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ArcGIS Conversion Tools: Import Metadata

Note: This is the third in a series of posts describing the metadata tools in ArcGIS. 

ArcGIS contains several tools for metadata creation, editing, and transformations.  They are found in Conversion Tools - Metadata.  This post reviews the Import Metadata tool.  

The Import Metadata tool can function as a series of tools.  

  • First, it Upgrades the metadata to be imported into ArcGIS 1.0 metadata format.  Four options are offered:  
    • FROM_ARCGIS - The metadata is already in the ArcGIS 1.0 format, so the Upgrade process is not necessary.  
    • FROM_ESRIISO, FROM_FGDC, or FROM_ISO_19139 - If one of these parameters is chosen, the source metadata will be updated. 
  • Next, it Imports the external metadata into the target.  
    • Any elements from the source metadata will overwrite those fields in the target metadata.
    • However, elements NOT present in the source metadata will not overwrite the target metadata to create blank fields.
  • Finally, it Synchronizes the dataset.  
    • This updates the technical information from ArcGIS into the target metadata.
    • This is especially useful if the target is a dataset without a pre-existing ArcGIS metadata file.  For a shapefile, this will generate a shp.xml file that holds both the technical and imported metadata.


Importing an eternal XML metadata file into an existing ArcGIS 1.0 format file.

There are situations when the descriptive (manual entry) metadata is stored in an XML file that is not linked with the dataset. This situation often occurs when metadata has been created outside of the ArcGIS environment, such as with the Minnesota Metadata Editor.  

This shapefile from the Minnesota Geospatial Commons has the following structure:


It has both a shp.xml file in the ArcGIS 1.0 format, and a metadata.xml file in FGDC format.  The ArcGIS 1.0 file contains different information than the FGDC file.

  • The ArcGIS file contains:
    • Spatial Reference properties (projection, coordinate system, etc)
    • Spatial Data Properties, such as geometry, feature classes
    • Lengthy Geoprocessing history
    • Attribute Table
  • The editable portion of the  FGDC file contains:
    • Title
    • Tags
    • Summary
    • Description
    • Use limitation
    • Resource Constraints
    • Some attribute fields
    • The Read-only portion contains:
      • Date
      • Coordinates
      • Data quality
      • Distribution
      • Metadata reference

 The Import Metadata tool will essentially merge these two files and store all of the information in the shp.xml file.

Note: there is an extra step that is unique to this shapefile structure:  Before we can run the tool, we need to rename the file metadata.xml to something else.  ArcCatalog does not recognize files with the name "metadata.xml."  Oddly, it will read the file if you select its parent folder titled "metadata," but when you open the folder, it displays as empty.  Furthermore, if you try to import the folder titled "metadata," it will throw an error.  At this time, I recommend just changing the name of the xml.  Here we called it SNA.xml.
Select the following parameters:



After running the tool, all of the metadata is in the shp.xml file. Additionally, the Synchronization tool transferred the bounding box coordinates to the Extents section - a necessary element for our geoportal.