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Metadata

Metadata is data about data — extra information stored alongside files, images, or other digital content that describes properties like creation date, location, and file size. This topic covers what metadata is, how it works, and the different ways it can be stored.

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About this video

Metadata is data about data — supplemental information attached to or associated with a digital file that describes its properties rather than its core content. A digital image, for instance, is fundamentally a grid of pixels defined by red, green, and blue values that combine to form a visible picture. Beyond that pixel data, metadata can record contextual details such as when and where the photo was taken, its dimensions, and its file size. This distinction between the content itself and the descriptive information surrounding it is central to understanding how modern file systems and applications manage digital assets. Metadata can be stored in several ways: embedded directly within the file, saved as a separate sidecar file that travels alongside it, or recorded in an external database. Each approach serves different technical and organizational needs, but the purpose is consistent — to provide additional context that makes data easier to identify, manage, and retrieve. Common file types carry metadata that is readily accessible through standard operating system interfaces, including properties such as date created, date modified, and last accessed time. Editing a file updates these values automatically, making metadata a dynamic record of a file's history rather than a static label. Understanding metadata is foundational to IT support, digital forensics, and cybersecurity work. Timestamps and location data embedded in files can be critical for incident response and investigations, while awareness of what metadata exists helps professionals manage information exposure and data privacy. Recognizing where metadata lives and how it behaves across different storage methods is a practical skill applicable across a wide range of technical disciplines.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Metadata

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+
1.4 Explain the value of data and information.
1.2 Compare and contrast fundamental data types and their characteristics.
CompTIA A+ Core 2
1.3 Given a scenario, use features and tools of the Microsoft Windows 10/11 operating system (OS).

Key terms

Metadata
Data that describes other data — such as a file's name, size, creation date, and author — allowing operating systems and applications to organize, index, and manage content without reading the content itself.
File
A named collection of data stored on a storage medium and tracked by the file system, which records its name, location, size, and attributes so the operating system can retrieve it on demand.
Creation Date
A metadata attribute that records the date and time a file was originally created.
Modification Date
A metadata attribute that records the date and time a file was last changed or saved.
File Location
A metadata attribute that identifies the path or directory where a file is stored on a system.

Topics

Metadata File Systems Data Storage Digital Forensics File Attributes

Transcript

At times we need to know more information about certain data that we have. For instance, let's say I have a picture. That picture is made up of data; that data then gets translated and then displayed on our screens. But maybe we want some additional information about that picture. Well, that's what metadata is: metadata is extra data about that data.

Extra data about data

A picture is made up of pixels, and those pixels are represented by how much red, how much green and how much blue are in each one of those pixels, and then you put it all together and we actually form a picture. Here's the data that we have that we can translate into picture form, and this is what we see on our screen. But there are times we want additional information about that picture. For instance, we take a trip to Paris and we take a picture of the Eiffel Tower; we may want to know when did we take that picture. So metadata is extra data that's stored about this data. What we have here is maybe the location, which is Paris, maybe the time and the date that it was taken, and perhaps it has some information about the size of this photo. So it's extra information that goes into what this picture is all about.

Where metadata is stored

Of course, if we have metadata then somehow we need to store that metadata, and there's a couple ways we can do this. We can either do it embedded into a picture right here, or perhaps we save it along with it so it's a separate file that gives additional information about this picture. Or maybe we store it in someplace like a database, and we have a database that we store this in. So there are different ways that we can store metadata.

Our files usually have additional information, or metadata, that's stored. So for instance, this text file right here has the type of file it is, it has a description, it has things like the date created and date modified. So we can find some additional information about this file; that would be metadata.

Looking at a file's properties

I'm on my demo laptop, and let's take a look at a file. I've created a file in here, and I'm going to right click on it to view some of this additional information. I'm going to go down to properties and open up the properties, and here we can see some of the information. We'll take a look at the created, modified and access. This was created at 1217 today and then it was modified at 1218, so I opened it up, added some text, and you can see that right there. And then the last accessed.

So let's go ahead and open this back up and make a change to it and see how this time changes here. I'm going to close this, let's open it and just make a change. I'm just going to say something real simple here, change, and I'll save that. We're going to close it and then we'll take a look at the properties again. So here we go. You can see that's also the last time that we accessed it.

I also have this details tab, which shows me some other information about this: where it's located at, we see the type of document it is, the name of the file. So it's just some other information that we have around this particular file. So that is some of the metadata.

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