Jeff Sedlik (PLUS) – Speech at the Photo Metadata Conference

If keyword are chaos – then intellectual property (copyright) marking is mayhem.

The mission of PLUS – Simplify & Facilitate Image Licensing.
Specific Focus:

1. Global Metadata Standards for the Communication of Image Rights.
2. Supporting Systems

PLUS Must Provide Broad Benefit

• Any and all licensing models.
• Commissioned and stock images.
• Photography, illustration, artworks.
• Any country/law/language.
• Before, during & after transaction.
• No pricing.
• Benefit everyone, everywhere.

This with the “no pricing” point is important since many countries prohibit pricing alliances.

Plus has built a glossary of 1500 license and intellectual property related terms. Words end definitions from a multitude of image agencies from the whole world were collected. Then they look on how the overlapped and made a joint work to build a common glossary. Both Licensors & Licensees have approved them. The glossary was written in American English, it is now being translated into other languages. This reflects the common practice of PLUS; create a Foundation in 1 Language, and then let local working groups translate.

PLUS has developed a media matrix and a license data format. The have standardized menus to be used by e-commerce solutions. This makes the buyer comfortable since he sees the same structure and definitions independent of image supplier. When an image is licensed the seller embeds a license code string that identifies the allowed use for that specific image. This string is embedded in the image. PLUS has built a license generator to be used by the Licensor and decoder to be used by the Licensee. Both are open source and free of charge.

To simplify the adoption of PLUS they have build a set of standard licenses for rights managed material. This are called PLUS packs. SAA (Stock Artists Alliance) has built a price calculator that for this that you can populate with your own pricelist.

PLUS are also building up registrars were you will be able to register images and to who and how the have been licensed. This will be independent of buyers and sellers.

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

Harald Löffler (IPTC) – Speech at the Photo Metadata Conference

Wouldn‘t it be nice …
…to have an automatic image workflow from the photographer to the publisher?
… to know all the time, when and where and by whom a photo was created?
… to get your revenue share?
… not to rekey again, what others have already done earlier?
… to create high quality colour images for different types of publications?
… without manual intervention

Don’t throw away metadata – conserve it. IFRA has done extensive work regarding image processing issues. They found that conservation of EXIF-data is important for correct and efficient image processing. Specially ICC-related data. But it’s also important to not limit metadata standards to images descending from cameras – it must work for any type of image.

Conclusions and open issues:

• Well defined mapping between metadata properties of different schemas
• Write-Once metadata values
• Versioning of metadata values
• Cameras should allow easy-to-preset metadata values
• Cameras should deliver more than Exif metadata
• Improved support for controlled vocabularies as the source of metadata values on the user interface level
• Consistent implementation and use of photo metadata standards must be improved
• Imaging devices not restricted to cameras anymore
• A key feature of metadata for digital assets are globally unique identifiers

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

Michael Steidl (IPTC) – Speech at the Photo Metadata Conference

Michael started with telling the background of IPTC. The IIM standard was introduced 1994. The current ITPC Core was published year 2005. Today those live in parallel. Proper synchronization of data in-between IIM and Core are very important. This must be handled by software.

There are several common misuses of IPTC-fields. One that used to be very common are that the date field is populated with scanning date instead date of the actual capture. Today several fields have different name in different applications, sometimes event with different software application versions. With localization this even get worse due to varying translations. It is important to have consequent naming.

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

Roger Bacon (Reuters) – Speech at the Photo Metadata Conference

Reuters have 600 employed photographers and image editors. They produce 1 500 images per day. The photographer are responsible to enter basic metadata as:
• headline
• caption
• category code
• urgency
• supplemental category code (not keywords)
• byline
• credit
• object name
• date created
• city
• state (USA only)
• country
• original transmission reference

The photographer does NOT add keywords!

Add metadata early and don’t throw it away. It would be an advantage if you could upload categories to the camera for quick selection by the photographer. Information like time and place should be handled automatically. Another wanted feature would be if the photographer could enter routing information in the image before shouting so the images automaticallay can be distributed via selected channels.

Reuters currently strips away EXIF data. One major client complained that this information broke his workflow. Reuters adds rights information to the caption and to the special instructions field. But rights management is one important part to simplify. The information that are entered for news purposes doesn’t work well for stock use. There are also several customers asking for RAW-files. Another special request came from MSN – the wanted square thumbnails to make the images appear correct in their template.

Summary:
• Industry Standards allow us to concentrate on what makes us different
• Common standards are great for the client
• What are we discarding today that will be invaluable tomorrow?

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

Jan Leidicke (BVPA / Keystone) – Speech at the Photo Metadata Conference

Most stock agencies only use the older IIM standard for IPTC information. They can not properly handle XMP based metadata like IPTC-core.

For historical images you often don’t know exact creation date. But he current date field requires you to specify year, month and day. Then the editor enters a fake month and day just to get past, this is not very good. We need to change the definition of this field to allow less precise dates.

We also lack relevant fields for:
* model release
* type use that are allowed
* With what rights the image was bought
Metadata that are entered with use of controlled vocabularies are easier to translate. It’s also important to enter the information in the correct field. Image buyers expect to find certain information in a specific field independent of image source.

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

Simon Span (The Mirror) – Speech at Photo Metadata Conference

Thanks to EXIF information it’s now easier to process images in newspaper workflows. It is important to keep EXIF and ITPC metadata through the whole process.

Today images goes through several adjustments and conversions. Each of conversion gives a quality loss. We should adjust the image as early as possible and then do as few corrections and conversions as possible. We at the newspaper can’t fine-tune every image. We must be able to use automatic conversion.
Keep the image in any of the standard color spaces (AdobeRGB or sRGB) and go straight from there to CMYK close to the press. Today most newspaper workflows are based on the use of the IFRA26 ICC profile instead of custom press color profiles.

The photographer should enter as much information as possible shortly after the shoot. Camera manufacturers need to ensure that information is embedded in a non-proprietary format

A problem today is that only 10 to 15 % of all incoming image files contain EXIF information.

“What I’d like to see…
* Further development of software capable of using Exif metadata. Products such as Agfa Intellitune
* Education of photographers (in terms of manipulating images prior to us receiving them)”

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

Peter Krogh – Speech at IPTC Photo Metadata Conference

Many Photoshop XMP-fields lacks a corresponding IPTC field. One is the Copyright flag field – Peter suggests that this one should immediately be included into the IPTC standard.

One interesting problem is how to handle metadata for image collages. We would need the possibility to copy all metadata from all source images to the composite. To enable this we need a new XMP bag-container.

For keywords he would like to see parent-child relations (a type of three hierarchy). This could be implemented as an alternative field that shows the relation between keywords. By this implementation we can do this without breaking the current keyword function.
We also need a new type of field for all those keywords that are not true keywords. The keyword field is heavily used for process and handling instructions (archive, retouch, re-scan). Peter suggests a bag-container with note fields for this kind of labeling.

He also suggest alternate metadata sets for different uses, users and alternate renderings. More or less a type of versioning system. This makes it possible for the image editor or distributor to add and modify captions and keyword and still leaving the original metadata from the photographer.

You can read more about Peter Krogh here

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .