Forum Discussion
How to edit Meta-Data easily?
Support for metadata in SharePoint is limited via the web. The OneDrive for Business client also does not support metadata. There are also no major changes planned for (see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=SharePoint%2CIn%20development#owRoadmapMainContent).
Other characteristics to be aware off are:
a. changing metadata via the standard SharePoint web page indeed saves directly after changing a field. However, each changed value results in a document version that will consume your storage quota. This becomes particularly painful when dealing with large media files.
Note: simply renaming a file also results in a new document version
b. uploading files (using the Modern View) when there are required fields does not force users to enter values. They are informed but can choose to not fill out the values.
c. it is not possible to extract metadata from the files during uploading (e.g. keywords from pdf files, sent date from emails, GPS location from photos, ...)
d. downloading files plus the files' metadata is not possible.
The Collab365 web site lists several document management tools for SharePoint (https://collab365.com/best-document-management-solutions-for-sharepoint/).
The explorer one may be of interest to you. It shows the metadata as a wide pane (https://www.slimapplications.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ExplorerEditProperties.png). Commonly used column types (date, lookup, ...) are supported and there is also support for columns of type "Location". It does not save the metadata after each individual change so there is no delay. One does have to click "save" to save the changed fields in a single request and this does not result in a new version. The user is forced to set values for required fields during uploading and extracting metadata from the files during uploading is possible. It is also possible to download files from SharePoint plus the files' metadata.