To display image metadata in a web application, developers can store and retrieve data from a Couchbase bucket using HTML, jQuery on the client-side, and Node.js components running on the server-side. The app allows users to "like" images by clicking an anchor element, which triggers an Ajax call to update the like count in the database. Additionally, the app enables listing images by a particular tagname by passing the tagname when the anchor is clicked and using it to filter out images from the database. The Couchbase Query Workbench can be used to troubleshoot issues during npm-install, such as resolving errors related to Python executable not found.