In the specific context of Connecter, we use the terms “cataloged” and “uncataloged” to differentiate between assets that have been assigned any metadata and those that don’t have such attributes added to them. That could be a tag, custom property, description, etc.
Most of Connecter’s functionalities lead to cataloging the asset, while others actually require you to catalog your assets. For example, if you want to use Web Catalogs, you need to catalog your assets in some way so you can see them in the web portal and use them to create Collections, Smart Catalogs, and Asset Sets.
One of the main benefits is that cataloged assets are much harder to lose. For instance, if you move, rename, or delete an uncataloged asset outside of Connecter (ex., in your Windows File Explorer), you won’t see a trace of these actions. However, if you do the same to a cataloged asset, it’ll appear as “missing” in the app, notifying you of the changes.
NOTE: Currently, there’s no way to uncatalog an asset for optimization purposes. So, if you untag an asset, for example, it won’t become uncataloged.