After more than 20 years of operation the situation concerning metadata at the ESRF is still very disparate between beamlines. The way the metadata required to analyse the raw data are defined and collected depends largely on the beamline concerned. Approaches vary from fully automated solutions implemented on the MX beamlines to a combination of automated and manual collection of metadata. This talk will not present the solution for MX (see talk by Gordon Leonard for more info) but will present a new approach for automating the collection and storing of well defined metadata for all experiments. The solution is based on a generic tool built at the ESRF which uses HDF5 for file format, Nexus for definitions (where possible) and ICAT for the metadata catalogue. The talk will present concrete examples of its use for nano tomography and fluorescence and radiation therapy. Ongoing work on how this will be extended to small angle scattering, coherent diffraction and eventually all other techniques will be presented. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the role of metadata in data policy and management.