Last summer, I became Chairman of the IPTC. My goal as Chair is to make IPTC better by improving the face-to-face meetings and improving how we communicate. So, how are we doing?

We recently held our Spring face-to-face meeting in New York, NY. Feedback from attendees was that the meeting was a success.

One of the things we did differently in this meeting was to put less emphasis on formal reports from the different standards initiatives within IPTC and more focus on active discussions, even when not connected to a particular standard. We held five topical sessions:

• Taxonomies in news and the semantic exchange
• Sports working session on Sports-in-JSON and new semantic tools in SportsML 3
• HTML in NewsML-G2
• Video metadata
• APIs

Generally, the feedback on these was very positive. The main complaint was that sessions were held in parallel, whereas some people wanted to attend more than one topic session at the same time.

Also, taking advantage of our location in NYC, we were able to include a wider net of organizations and individuals in our meeting than might other wise attend – including Bloomberg, NPR, Business Wire, PR Newswire.
Overall, the meeting was much less formal than in recent years – we only had one vote (for a NewsML-G2 update). Hopefully, the meeting was a little friendlier and less intimidating for new attendees.

We are planning on building on this experience for our next face-to-face meeting 1st-3rd June in Warsaw. You can see some of the ideas that have been suggested already and please get in touch if you would like to suggest a topical session for either Warsaw or our October AGM in London.

Stuart Myles

Chairman of the Board of Directors

An earlier version of this post appeared on smyles blog.

The latest version of NewsML-G2 is now available as a Developer Release, and can be download from the Release Section of the IPTC Developer Site. This version enhances the existing global standard for multimedia news and events exchange by including support for news feed identifiers, content permalinks and URI properties.

Please visit the IPTC Standards Page for a full list of the available IPTC standards.

Welcome to our newly launched website! After a few months of development and content evaluation we can proudly present a faster, lightweight, more business focused, and most importantly: mobile-ready website.

The IPTC is a volunteer-driven membership organization and it’s important that we are easily approachable — both literally and figuratively. Over the last few years, many of you have told us that you found it too difficult to locate information about the IPTC, our standards or even how to get in touch with us. So we fixed all that.

Focus on business value.

We have the full roster of IPTC standards explained, in brief and with a clear focus on the business value of each standard. Rapid innovation and agile product development cycles at web scale are practically impossible without the underpinning of solid technical standards — the IPTC delivers those, for a variety of use cases in today’s publishing and media environment. 

In short, our new website is aimed at those of you who are looking for those IPTC standards, for general information about the organization and for the benefits of being a member. (We maintain a separate website for developers with in-depth technical information.)

We’d also like to say thanks to Kevin and Jonathan, our design and development team at Iron to Iron; they really did a great job and are a pleasure to collaborate with.

Have a look around, let us know if something looks wrong or if you’re missing anything. And do consider joining us — we’d love to have you on board.

Andreas Gebhard
(Lead of the website project team)

Adding metadata to images costs money but developments in the image industry indicate a real return for those who invest in their metadata workflow now. In an increasingly automated workflow metadata drives distribution and management in all sectors. At the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2015 participants will hear from practitioners and game changers in rights management, software and user interfaces about how quality metadata improves business. The conference will be held on 4 June 2015 in Warsaw, Poland, in conjunction with the CEPIC Congress 2015. Find more at phmdc.org

IPTC announced a new version of its Photo Metadata Standard, the most widely used standard to describe photos. It allows users to add precise and reliable data about people, products, locations and artwork shown in an image, and provides an improved and flexible way to express rights associated with a picture. IPTC is the world’s leading standards body for the news media and aims to simplify the distribution of information. The specification of this standard can be downloaded from the Photo Metadata Standard section.