Media Release

London (England) — The challenge that images with badly managed rights may result in unprotected work will be discussed at the seventh IPTC Photo Metadata Conference which will be held on 13 June in Barcelona (Spain).  Speakers from all over Europe will debate changes in rights handling in the picture industry and will address latest technology for machine readable rights. The Conference will be held at the annual Congress of the European picture agency association CEPIC. Details of the Conference can be found at www.phmdc.org including how to register for this industry event. Tweets about it will use #phmdc13 as hashtag.

The future of image rights licensing will be shaped by methods of communicating rights as well as the nature of the rights on offer. This year’s conference will discuss how machine readable rights may be used in the image licensing workflow.  What standards will be needed and what are the limits to automation?  The IPTC has invited vendors to discuss how software can enable rights management. Image libraries and users will talk about their experience of rights licensing and improvements they would like to see, and the conference will address the possibilities for metadata entered at image capture.

The most recent and widely discussed changes in copyright law in the UK, the use of the PLUS standard for machine readable rights in practice, and plans for a CEPIC-run image registry, as well as the IPTC Embedded Metadata Manifesto survey on metadata handling by social media sites will be other topics of the Conference.

Special sessions will be “Metadata and Cultural Heritage Images” and a round table discussion “Metadata technology – what the future might bring”.

The one day conference offers the chance to hear to expert speakers, and to take part in break out discussion sessions on topics vital to the future of the image creation and licensing industry.  It is a must for photographers, image libraries, and all those interested in the future of the image industry.

The IPTC, based in London, is a consortium of the world’s major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world. Its standards include the Photo Metadata standards IPTC Core and Extension, the rights expression language RightsML, the news exchange formats NewsML-G2, SportsML-G2, NITF, rNews, and the IPTC NewsCodes. Visit the web site www.iptc.org or follow @IPTC on Twitter.