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We’re very happy that we can make public some of the video recordings from the recent IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020, held on Tuesday 13 October 2020.
Thanks to all who attended – we had over 200 registrations for the webinar.
The videos are embedded below or can be viewed directly on YouTube by following the link above the embedded video.
Introduction
Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC, opened the day with an introduction to IPTC and an overview of what was to come (10 minutes):
Michael Steidl, Photo Metadata WG lead on IPTC Photo Metadata
Michael Steidl presented on why we should care about photo metadata in his presentation “About IPTC Photo Metadata” (48 minutes including Q&A)
Google’s Licensable Images features
Francois Spies, a Product Manager for Google Images in Mountain View, presented on the Licensable Images features which they developed in consultation with IPTC this year.
After Francois’ presentation, Matthew O’Such, VP SEO for Getty Images and Marcin Czyzewski, CTO and Picturemaxx joined us to share their views on implementing the changes to IPTC Photo Metadata required to power the Google Licensable Images feature. Then we had a Q&A session including Michael, Francois, Matthew and Marcin.
Unfortunately, Google asked us not to make a recording of their presentation or the panel available. However the resources that Francois shared are all available via our Quick Guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images.
Andy Parsons on the Content Authenticity Initiative
Next up, Andy Parsons (Adobe) introduced the Content Authenticity Initiative (47 minutes including Q&A and a wrap-up of the day from Brendan Quinn):
Thanks again to all our speakers and panellists for their contributions. We’re already looking forward to next year’s event!
Currently next year’s IPTC Photo Metadata Conference is scheduled to be in late May 2021 in Mallorca, Spain in conjunction with the CEPIC Congress 2021. If that proves impractical then we will host another online event.
The Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) is holding its annual conference this week. IPTC and IPTC members have a strong presence – particularly IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub.
Mark Milstein of IPTC member Microstocksolutions joined in hosting the opening “virtual cocktail party” on Sunday 25 October. Mark is leading efforts to promote IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub at DMLA, see his recent post on DMLA’s site.
Angela Weiss, a staff photographer with IPTC member Agence France-Presse, took part in a panel “Tales from the Trenches – True Stories from Working Photojournalists” on Monday. Then Mark Milstein was back on the “Hot Topics in Tech” panel along with Matthew O’Such of IPTC member Getty Images. Matthew also spoke on our panel at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference two weeks ago.
On Tuesday, Andy Parsons of IPTC member Adobe is presenting a keynote on the Content Authenticity Initiative. Of course IPTC members already heard Andy speak at the Photo Metadata Conference, and at the Adobe MAX conference last week. Andy is very busy getting the word out!
On Wednesday, Mathieu Desoubeaux of new IPTC member IMATAG speaks on the “Image Protection – Creating a More Secure Ecosystem” panel.
On Thursday, Matthew O’Such of Getty Images is back along with Francois Spies of Google giving a reprise of his IPTC Photo Metadata Conference talk on the Google search “Licensable Images” features. Also on the panel is Roxana Stingu of Alamy, part of IPTC member PA Media.
Thursday afternoon, IPTC metadata gets a front-row seat at DMLA with the “Taming Video Metadata” panel, moderated by Mark Milstein of Microstocksolutions and featuring a presentation by Pam Fisher, IPTC individual member and lead of the IPTC Video Metadata Working Group. On the panel, Zach Bernstein of Storyblocks will be speaking about his implementation of IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub.
The conference also features panels on synthetic content, the legal aspects of the photo licensing industry, artificial intelligence and more.
Thanks to DMLA for putting together such an interesting event!
We had a great IPTC Member Meeting last week, our second online event. We’re getting used to online events now!
After introductions and a get-to-know-your-fellow-members session, Dave Compton of Refinitiv presented the NewsML-G2 Working Group‘s report. We didn’t have a new version of NewsML-G2 this time but we are doing work on making NewsML-G2 easier to understand and to use. We have been working on a NewsML-G2 Generator (soon to be launched), NewsML-G2 unit tests and a Python module. Some proposals for additions to NewsML-G2 were also discussed.
Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director then hosted a re-introduction to semantic web technology: RDF, SPARQL, schema.org and how they relate to GraphQL, knowledge graphs and other buzzwords in 2020’s world of data. This proved to be a useful background and refresher for many of the following sessions over the next three days that touched upon semantic technology in almost every presentation!
Paul Kelly, individual member and group lead, presented the Sports Content Working Group‘s report highlighting the work that the group is pursuing on looking at a more semantically rich successor to SportsML.
Jennifer Parrucci of The New York Times presented the NewsCodes Working Group report. The focus since the last meeting was on a new batch of Media Topics terms, refreshing some labels and definitions, and adding more translations – we are now up to 11 languages in the Media Topics vocabulary! We have also updated the Genres vocabulary and launched the Trust Indicators CV.
Still on metadata and controlled vocabularies, we hosted a presentation and discussion session about Named Entities for News, including presentations by IPTC members Christoffer Krona from iMatrics, Jennifer Parrucci from The New York Times and Jeremy Tarling from BBC showing their organisations’ approach to managing metadata for named entities such as people, places and organisations. We had an interesting discussion about how IPTC can help the industry to move forward in managing named entities. Look out for more information from us soon!
On Tuesday, we started with Michael Steidl‘s Photo Metadata Working Group presentation, including a report on how the Google Licensable Images work has been received. Pam Fisher, lead of the Video Metadata Working Group then presented ongoing work towards a new user guide for video metadata, based on use cases and scenarios so we can make video metadata more approachable for people in different parts of the media industry.
Johan Lindgren of TT Nyhetsbyrån presented the work of the News in JSON Working Group, including discussions of work towards a ninjs 2.0, looking at how ninjs can map to binary serialisation formats such as Protocol Buffers and Avro, and support for machine-readable rights in ninjs documents.
The second half of Tuesday was filled by the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020 – see our separate news post about that event!
Wednesday morning was dedicated to important IPTC internal business, including the IPTC 2020 Annual General Meeting, where we re-elected the current board including Robert Schmidt-Nia of DATAGROUP as IPTC Chair. Linda Burman, individual member and Chair of the PR Committee,
We also held the Autumn 2020 IPTC Standards Committee Meeting, chaired by Stéphane Guérillot of Agence France-Presse, where we discussed our ongoing project to “make IPTC standards more usable”. If you have any ideas about how we can make our work more usable or more accessible, please get in touch!
We ended the day with presentations from Laurent Le Meur of EDRLab, Steve Callanan of WireWax presenting their video analysis and manipulation tools, and Andy Read of the BBC speaking about their implementation of the GRID open source image management system.
IPTC members can find PDFs of all presentation files on the members-only event page.
The IPTC Autumn Meeting 2020 will take place next week, from Monday 12 October to Wednesday 14 October. The meeting will be held online using the Zoom platform, as we did for the IPTC Spring Meeting in May.
Over 30 IPTC member organisations will be represented, with more still finalising their attendance.
Presentations will range from Working Group updates and our 2020 Annual General Meeting to presentations from invited startups, discussions on IPTC participation in industry projects, and exciting presentations from members on relevant projects within their companies.
The IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020 is “co-located” with the IPTC Autumn Meeting – so we will be moving from the member meeting to the Photo Metadata Conference on the Tuesday afternoon.
Attendance is free for IPTC members. If you are not already registered, please go to the Members-Only event page to register.
We are very happy to announce that this year’s IPTC Photo Metadata Conference will be conducted fully online, and for the first time ever, is free for all to attend.
This year’s conference takes place on Tuesday October 13, 2020 from 15:00 – 18:00 UTC time (see times in other timezones below).
We have some very special guests for this year’s conference:
Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, will introduce IPTC Photo Metadata, and discuss recent developments, and what we see in the future of photo metadata.
Francois Spies, Product Manager, Google Images will present Google’s recent work on the “Licensable Images” project, which adds a “licensable” badge to images in Google search results, and links from the image preview panel in search results pages directly back to a place where users can obtain a licence to re-use the image.
Andy Parsons, Director of Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe will present the Content Authenticity Initiative, which is “designing components and drafting standards specifications for a simple, extensible and distributed media provenance solution.”
How will the Content Authenticity Initiative work? What work has been done so far and what still needs to be done? How can you help?
Please register here via Zoom – it’s free!
The IPTC Photo Metadata Conference has been held in conjunction with the CEPIC Congress for many years. The 2020 CEPIC Congress has been postponed to 19 to 21 May 2021, but with so much going on in the world of image metadata, we didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity, so we are holding a virtual event this year. We look forward to joining CEPIC again next year, hopefully in Mallorca in May 2021.
IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020: times around the world
- UTC / GMT: Weds 13 October, 1500 – 1800 UTC
- London: Weds 13 October, 1600 – 1900 BST
- Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna: Weds 13 October, 1700 – 2000 CEST
- Helsinki, Dubai, Tallinn: Weds 13 October, 1800 – 2100 EEST
- New York, Toronto: Weds 13 October, 1100 – 1400 EDT
- Beijing, Shanghai: Weds 13 October, 2300 – Thurs 14 October, 0200
When you register for the webinar on Zoom you will be sent a calendar invitation so you can make sure you attend at the right time!
In association with World News Day, IPTC is presenting a webinar on our efforts to help news organisations address trust, credibility and misinformation via our standards.
Through our work with The Trust Project, Reporters Sans Frontières’ Journalism Trust Initiative, Credibility Coalition and others, we have been able to create extensions to IPTC standards to enable news organisations to express various “Trust Indicators”.
Learn more about how this works and how it can lead to a more trustworthy news media.
Register for the webinar here via Zoom
UPDATE: The webinar has now ended, but you can view the recording by registering on the link above.
For information on other World News Day events, please see the main site at https://worldnewsday.org/
The IPTC is excited to announce a new membership category aimed exclusively at tech startups working in the news and media industry.
The International Press Telecommunications Council is the community of leading members of the news, media and technology industries who share ideas and create technical standards that drive the industry forward.
The IPTC works across a broad range of technical areas in the news and media industry: from multi-media news syndication, to subject taxonomies used to classify news content, embedded image standards, machine-readable rights and semantic web standards.
Until now, IPTC members have mostly been large media companies (such as Bloomberg, Associated Press, Agence France Presse, Deutsche Press Agentur, Reuters News & Media, New York Times, and the BBC), large companies in the photo industry (Getty Images, Shutterstock, Visual China Group) and key technology vendors that serve the media industry (Adobe, Sourcefabric and Fotoware).
But today, more than ever, key innovations in the media industry come from large established companies and small startups working together.
Therefore, the IPTC has created a new membership category: Startup Membership.
With the new membership category, IPTC will become the forum where large and small companies can connect to share ideas, to start projects and to collaborate on creating standards for information exchange.
The IPTC regularly collaborates with all parts of the media industry plus standards organisations such as ISO and W3C and organisations in related industries such as CEPIC and camera manufacturers organisation CIPA. We also work with huge platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. This new membership category will bring startup members into those conversations.
For more details, please get in touch with IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn at mdirector@iptc.org. Fees will vary depending on criteria such as the age and funding status of your startup.
We are excited to see the creative projects and new innovations that will emerge from the combination of startups with larger organisations in the IPTC community.
— Robert Schmidt-Nia, Chair of the Board, IPTC
Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, spoke on a workshop panel at the Perpignan Photojournalism Conference “Visa Pour L’Image”.
The panel session was pre-recorded and released this week.
This joint workshop from Google, IPTC and Alamy covers some product updates from Google Images, including Image Rights Metadata and the new features on Google Images highlighting licensing information for images that we announced earlier this week. The speakers share best practices and experience on these features.
The speakers are:
- John Mueller, Google Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst
- Michael Steidl, IPTC working group lead
- Roxana Stingu, Alamy SEO Head
The IPTC is very happy to announce that as a result of our collaboration with Google and CEPIC, Google Images’s new licensable badge and other related features are now live.
This means that when photo owners include a photograph’s Web Statement of Rights (also known as Copyright Info URL) in an image’s embedded metadata, Google will display a “Licensable” badge on the image in Google Images search results and the image will appear when the “View all images with Commercial or other licenses” filter is selected. If the Licensor URL is also added, Google will feature a “get this image on” link that takes users directly to a page on the photo owner’s site enabling the user to easily obtain a license to re-use the image elsewhere.
The launch on Google Images comprises three different components:
- “Licensable” badge on image search results for images that have the required metadata fields
- Two new links in the Image Viewer (the panel that appears when a user selects an image result) for people to access the image supplier’s licensing information, namely:
- A “License details” link. This directs users to a page defined by the image supplier explaining how they can license and use the image responsibly
- A “Get this image on” link, which directs users to a page from the image supplier where users can directly take the necessary steps to license the image
- A “License details” link. This directs users to a page defined by the image supplier explaining how they can license and use the image responsibly
- A Usage Rights drop-down filter in Google Image search results pages to support filtering results for Creative Commons, commercial, and other licenses.
“As a result of a multi-year collaboration between IPTC and Google, when an image containing embedded IPTC Photo Metadata is re-used on a popular website, Google Images will now direct interested users back to the supplier of the image,” said Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group. “This is a huge benefit for image suppliers and an incentive to add IPTC metadata to image files.”
The features have been in beta since February, and after extensive testing, refinement and discussion with IPTC, CEPIC and others, Google is rolling out the new features this week.
As we describe in the Quick guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images, image owners can choose from two methods to enable the Licensable badge and “Get this image” link: embedding IPTC metadata in image files, or including structured schema.org metadata in the HTML of the web page hosting the image.
Of the two approaches, using embedded IPTC metadata has two benefits. Firstly, the embedded metadata stays with the image even when it is re-used, so that the Licensable badge will appear even when the image is re-published on another website.
Secondly, the “Creator”, “Copyright” and “Credit” messages are only displayed in search results when they are declared using embedded IPTC metadata.
“The IPTC anticipates that this will lead to increased awareness of image ownership, copyright and licensing issues amongst content creators and users,” said Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC. “By providing direct leads to image owners’ websites, we hope that this leads to increased business for image suppliers both large and small.”
The Google announcements can be found here:
The NewsCodes Working Group is happy to announce the August 2020 update to IPTC NewsCodes.
Here’s an overview of the changes in this release:
Namerole vocabulary changes
Media Topics vocabulary changes
Hierarchy changes:
- Fixed multi-parent bug on medtop:20000175 “buyback”, medtop:20000184 “restructuring and recapitalisation”, and medtop:20000186 “stock activity”, the bug was introduced in a previous GitHub merge.
- Moved medtop:20000179 “earnings forecast” to be under medtop:20000171 “business finance”.
Label and definition changes:
- Fixing spelling error “sufferring” in definition of medtop:20000819 “long term care”.
- Changes to labels and definitions for medtop:20000617 “upper house” and medtop:20000616 “lower house”.
- Changed definition of medtop:20000241 “real estate” to include renting.
- medtop:20000588 changed from “censorship” to “censorship and freedom of speech”.
New terms:
- medtop:20001290 “public housing”
- medtop:20001291 “heating and cooling”
- medtop:20001292 “economic development incentive”
- medtop:20001293 “streaming service”
- medtop:20001294 “crowdfunding”
- medtop:20001295 “outsourcing”
- medtop:20001296 “shopping mall”
- medtop:20001297 “shopping district and high street”
- medtop:20001298 “artificial intelligence”
- medtop:20001299 “surveillance”
- medtop:20001300 “privacy”
NewsCodes Guidelines changes
- Fix broken link and added FAQ about contributing suggestions.
As always, HTML browseable versions of the MediaTopics can be found at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/treeview/mediatopic/mediatopic-en-GB.html and an Excel version at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/IPTC-MediaTopic-NewsCodes.xlsx.
Thanks very much to our Working Group members and contributors, especially Ritzau in Denmark and Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia, for their suggestions and support.
Update on 16 September 2020: Chinese translations of new terms are now added.
Please note that the textual changes are currently available in the Danish (dk), Chinese (zh-Hans), English (en-GB), Portuguese (pt-PT and pt-BR for Brazil), Norwegian (no) and Swedish-language (se) versions. More translated versions of the MediaTopics NewsCodes will be made available when their maintainers have updated them.