PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a study case of the digitization of documents kept by the Reino de Valencia Archive and its description and recovery through EXIF metadata from the digital images obtained. The control of digital images, in terms of identification of their number and the batches they belong to, can be achieved by naming the digital file with digits that the user can identify.Design/methodology/approachThe paper's objective is to provide image descriptions far better than by naming the file. For that reason the paper analyses the tools and results obtained with each one of them.FindingsResults about using commercial software for metadata image description.Originality/valueThe paper describes a novel use of metadata for historical archives documents.