# Is Sample Metadata Necessary in QIIME 2?

**URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/is-sample-metadata-necessary-in-qiime-2/1216
**Category:** User Support
**Tags:** metadata
**Created:** [September 12, 2017, 6:54pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/is-sample-metadata-necessary-in-qiime-2/1216 "2017-09-12T18:54:42Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![thermokarst](https://forum.qiime2.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/8e7dd6/32.png) [@thermokarst](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/thermokarst)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2017, 8:02pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/is-sample-metadata-necessary-in-qiime-2/1216/3 "2017-09-12T20:02:56Z")

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Hi @Lisa_Crummett!

> [@Lisa\_Crummett](#):
>
> I was able to successfully complete the Data2 denoise

Yay!

> [@Lisa\_Crummett](#):
>
> . I do not have a metadata and I thought that I didn’t need to create one as I imported a manifest file and sample data file in my first step

The [manifest format](https://docs.qiime2.org/2017.8/tutorials/importing/#fastq-manifest-formats) is something different than [metadata](https://docs.qiime2.org/2017.8/tutorials/metadata/) in QIIME 2. Your manifest file was responsible for telling QIIME 2 about your data, so that it knew how to import it. The sample metadata file is about telling QIIME 2 about various study-specific metadata (treatment vs control, timepoints, environmental measurements, etc.) Some actions in QIIME 2 require metadata, while some don't, it depends on what the action is intending to do. `feature-table summarize` is an example of a visualizer that optionally accepts metadata.

> [@Lisa\_Crummett](#):
>
> I got the following error:

The reason you got this error is because you provided a file that is viewable as metadata (`rep-seqs.qza`), but this data is oriented along the feature axis, while the `summarize` command is looking for metadata oriented along the sample axis. This error is specifically QIIME 2 complaining about not being able to find your sample IDs in your `rep-seqs.qza` file, which makes sense, because that file contains representative sequences, which is feature data.

Moving forward, you can rerun the command sans `--m-sample-metadata-file`, but I would recommend creating a sample metadata file, if it makes sense for your study. You can check out [keemei](http://keemei.qiime.org/), a tool we have created to help with setting up those files. I would also highly recommend going through the [Metadata tutorial](https://docs.qiime2.org/2017.8/tutorials/metadata/) when you get a chance.

Hope that helps!

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