I agree with everyone who says your description is important to look professional and having a good meta description will get more clicks. #1 = good. #1 with a good description = what you want.
if you have adsense on pages with just pics or video, adsense asks that you have meta tags to tell google what kind of contextual ads to place on your site.
It's true that google not giving preference to meta tags but then also we should try to add them and also change them in a week or 2 so that the tradition of site updation goes on..
There not really important exactly aslong as u make sure u do use them, just dont waste to much time trying to perfect them as they dont really make much effect like they used to back in the day.
Meta description is still pretty important since Google will list it in SERPs and a good one will get more click thrus (as described above) but Google will make up the description shown in SERPs from other text on the page if it thinks it's more relevant.