Thanks so much for your reply. May I ask what a metadata write-back process is please? 

Thanks for your reply. Really appreciated. I have now seen that all the other fields that contain data such as title; keywords; copyright etc, they too are not retaining the information added in the DAM, only information added via Adobe Bridge and the camera exif data. During the staging environment...

I have been adding smart tags to assets in AEM and have found that this information is not retained when the image assets are downloaded. Unlike all the other fields like keywords; title etc which become embedded and travel with the image. Does anyone have information on this please ?