IPTC Releases Results of 2016 Social Media Sites Photo Metadata Test

Important image metadata is not retained in images after upload to some of the most popular social media sites, according to a study by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).  The missing data includes key copyright and identification information as well as descriptive data about the image.

The IPTC, a consortium of over 50 news agencies and media companies, sets international technical standards for news exchange, including metadata embedded in image files. The recent Social Media Sites Photo Metadata Test repeats a survey in 2013; while improvements are noted, some sites scored lower this time around.

The Social Media Sites Photo Metadata Test evaluated 15 top social media sites, and checked if embedded metadata was retained and displayed on upload to the sites or downloads of various version of the image. The results are displayed at www.embeddedmetadata.org/testresults.

Only one social media site, Behance, received favorable results for retaining and displaying embedded data. A few systems retained embedded metadata but failed to use it when displaying metadata on the web site. Ten sites removed at least some metadata when images were downloaded to a desktop environment.

“There are many important reasons to embed and preserve metadata – to protect copyrights, ensure proper licensing, track image use, smooth workflow, and make them searchable on- or offline,” said Michael Steidl, Managing Director of IPTC. “If users provide captions, dates, a copyright notice and the creator within their images, that data shouldn’t be removed when sharing them on social media websites without their knowledge.”

There may be several reasons social media services remove metadata – and some may not be intentional. Test results showed that in some cases, when images were downloaded to a desktop environment, the metadata was preserved if the size of the image remained unchanged. But if the image was rescaled, the metadata was stripped. “The quality assurance of these sites might not be aware that their software strips metadata inadvertently,” said Steidl.

“Because many of the social media sites are essentially free, users become the product, and not necessarily the customers,” said David Riecks, a photographer and metadata consultant who owns ControlledVocabulary.com and worked on the test. “Users are often not aware of these practices. There should be a sweet spot between these social sites preserving all metadata and removing it all. I’d like to see more engineers working together to find solutions.”

The Embedded Metadata Manifesto was launched by IPTC in 2011 to draw attention to the importance of retaining important data embedded in image files. The website, www.embeddedmetadata.org also includes Embedded Metadata Manifesto’s five guidelines for how metadata should be handled and preserved in digital media.

About IPTC: The IPTC, based in London, brings together the world’s leading news agencies, publishers and industry vendors. It develops and promotes efficient technical standards to improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries and consumers. The standards enable easy, cost-effective and rapid innovation and include the Photo Metadata standard, the news exchange formats NewsML-G2, SportsML-G2 and NITF, rNews for marking up online news, the rights expression language RightsML, and NewsCodes taxonomies for categorizing news. Visit www.iptc.org  and follow on Twitter: @IPTC

Contact: Michael Steidl, Managing Director, mdirector@iptc.org, +44 (20) 3178 4922
David Riecks, photographer and metadata consultant, david@riecks.com, +1 (217) 689-1376

A new version 2.22 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 adding time delimiters for the planning of news coverage and clarifying the rating of news.

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

IPTC invited experts to the News at a Crossroads symposium on 28 October 2015 to share predictions and outlooks about the most influential factors on the gathering, delivery and marketing of news today today and it brought together about 100 of leaders in the news industry.

Now a full documentation, including video, of this great event is available – come and see.

This will be the title of IPTC’s presentation at the JPEG Privacy & Security Workshop held in Brussels (Belgium) on Tuesday, 13 October 2015.

The major goal for applying metadata to a photo is: associate permanently with it descriptions of its visual content and data for managing it properly. This is done for more than two decades by embedding the metadata into JPEG files. Now in an internet driven business world a JPEG file may take many hops in a supply chain and is exposed to actions by humans and/or software stripping off metadata values.

IPTC as the body behind the most widely used business metadata schema for photos is permanently asked by people from the photo business how their metadata could be protected against deletion. This presentation will show the requirements in detail and also considerations about different levels of protection to meet the needs of the originators of photos and the needs of parties downstream.

This topic will be presented by Michael Steidl, IPTC’s Managing Director and lead of the Photo Metadata work.

Extensis, a leading developer of software and services for creative professionals and workgroups, joins IPTC to extend the company’s commitment to advancing standards designed to making working with metadata easier.

“Extensis as system vendor has taken the essential role of enabling companies managing photos to make efficient use of IPTC’s widely used photo metadata standard”, said Michael Steidl, IPTC managing director and lead of the photo metadata work. “IPTC welcomes Extensis as new member of our organization; we will work jointly on improving professional photo workflows”, he added.

Read the Extensis press release.

See the list of current IPTC members and find more about joining our organisation.

IPTC develops and maintains a rich set of standards for the media exchange. Now you can easily track the latest updates of all IPTC standards by the new Twitter feed @IPTCupdates. Updated standards show a corresponding flag also on the standards overview page.

The first tracked update is the latest modification of the Media Topic NewsCodes.

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 heard from practitioners and game changers in rights management about how quality metadata improves business. The conference was held on 4 June 2015 in Warsaw, Poland, in conjunction with the Cepic Congress 2015. Find slides and audio recordings of the presentations at phmdc.org

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.