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Knowledge Base

What Does Tagged Mean?

tagged

Files can contain tags, and images in particular often carry a field saying whether the file is Tagged or not. Find out what this means and where the tags themselves are kept.

Tags are keywords - plain descriptive words like holiday, invoice or wedding - stored inside a file so that it can be found again later. The Tagged field does not hold those words. It is a simple yes or no, telling you whether the file has any tags at all.

Which files carry it and where the value comes from

This flag shows up most often in image files, though the underlying idea applies to documents and media files just as well. It reflects the state of the fields inside the file that keywords are actually stored in.

Tags come from people. Someone typed them into a photo library, a file manager or an image editor, either to describe one file or to label a whole batch at once. Some photo applications can also add keywords for you, for example the names of people they recognise, or a place name taken from the location the photo was shot in. Because the words are freely chosen, no two people tag the same way, and there is no fixed vocabulary to expect.

What the value looks like

The field itself is about as simple as metadata gets:

  • Tagged: Yes - the file carries keywords
  • Tagged: No - it does not

Some tools print True and False instead. To see the words themselves, look for the neighbouring rows that hold them, which usually appear as Keywords or Subject, and read as a list: Keywords: holiday, beach, Anna.

This is not the same thing as a Tagged PDF. That flag has nothing to do with keywords - it describes whether a PDF contains a structure map of its headings, paragraphs and tables.

Why it matters

Tags are what make a large collection of files usable. Filenames and folders only get you so far; keywords let you pull together every picture of the same person or every document about the same project, whatever they are called and wherever they are stored. Crucially, tags written into the file travel with it, so they survive being copied to another computer or handed to someone else, while tags held only in an application's own catalogue stay behind.

That same portability is the reason to check this field before you share anything. Tags are words a human chose, and human words are specific: they name people, employers, clients, addresses, medical matters, events and relationships. A photo tagged with somebody's full name carries that name to every person who receives the file, even though nothing visible in the picture mentions it - and most people never look. If the report says Yes, read the keyword rows and decide whether you are happy for them to go along with the file. Removing the metadata removes the tags, which protects your privacy at the cost of the searchability they gave you.

Meta Keys

Scene Capture Type Photos shot with specific cameras may carry exif data labeled as the Scene Capture Type. Find out what this means and what it says about the photo. Shutter Speed When taking photos, you have surely heard of Shutter Speed. It is the length of the exposure, and it decides how sharp or how blurred a picture turns out. Here is what your value means. Software Software is a field found in all kinds of files: audio, video, document, image, e-book, data and more. What it says about your file in particular can be read up here. Thumbnail Image Thumbnail Image metadata can be found in many different kinds of files. If you want to know what it is and what the value says about your file in particular, read more. Time Base If you found a value for Time Base in your file, you surely want to know what it means. Find out information we gathered around the Time Base metadata. Title A Title is, typically, a name that was given to any kind of creative work. But what does it mean when you find it in the metadata of your file? Find out by reading more about the metadata tag Title.
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