If this sounds like your week
Deliverables include invisible data until they do not.
The right time to fix metadata is before the file is in someone else’s inbox or CMS. Editorial desks still receive CR3 or extracted JPEGs where owner, lens, and serial-adjacent strings create sourcing risk beyond what the story intends to reveal.
Where tooling usually breaks
Tooling sprawl is how policy becomes “we use five different methods.”
One repeatable desktop tool beats five heroic workflows.