What is Metadata?

Documents may contain information about the document itself: we call this metadata. For instance, a raster image file contains metadata recording the image's width and height; a word processing document may contain metadata recording the document's author and title. Metadata can be represented by key-value pairs. For instance, a document's title can be represented as the key "Title" and the value "Annual Report". We refer to a single metadata key-value pair as a metadata field.

Containers (documents with subfiles) can contain metadata about their subfiles. For instance, a Personal Folders (.pst) file is a container that can have multiple email messages as subfiles. A PST file may contain metadata, including the "To" and "From" fields of these subfiles.

Access Metadata using the Python API

You can access document metadata through the metadata attribute on a KeyView Document object.

You can access subfile metadata through the metadata attribute on a KeyView Subfile object.

KeyView uses Metadata and MetadataElement objects to represent metadata.

  • A Metadata object is a container of MetadataElement objects, allowing you to iterate over them or look them up by key.
  • A MetadataElement object represents one metadata field.