A method and system for providing on-demand updating of metadata information associated with clinical image data files is disclosed. The system allows for extracting, on the fly, additional metadata fields from clinical image data files and re-indexing the metadata to include the additional fields so that an end-user can perform operations (e.g., searching, browsing, etc.) based on the newly indexed fields. The metadata fields may be defined in a configurable schema file (e.g., XML, YML, etc.). The system can gain efficiencies by, for example, reading only a subset of the DICOM file (e.g., reading only the first few kilobytes that contain the header), scanning only a subset of source data folders, etc.