A clear majority of professional photo businesses in Europe and North America find IPTC photo metadata highly relevant to their business. That is the message received by IPTC from its 2019 photo industry supplier survey.

According to survey results, eight out of ten photo supplier companies say that data describing images and supporting searches by users is most relevant. Eight out of ten photographers say that metadata to express ownership and usage rights is most important.

These trends are shown by a survey among photo professionals conducted by IPTC, the maker of the industry standard for embedding descriptive, rights information and administrative metadata into images. The 2019 IPTC Photo Metadata Survey results were made public on 14 August 2019 and can be downloaded from the iptc.org website.

“We know that taking the time to apply photo metadata is an investment by photo businesses, so it’s good to see that they get a return,” said Michael Steidl, lead of IPTC’s Photo Metadata Working Group. “Still, we are pleasantly surprised by the importance that photo businesses give to metadata.”

The survey investigated how and why IPTC photo metadata are used in 2019, and more than 100 supplier companies and photographers from many European countries and the USA participated. Most respondents to the supplier survey are companies active in the stock images business, but IPTC also received responses from companies dealing with news photos, cultural heritage images and video footage. The primary business areas of photographers are stock images and public relations photos.

The main reason for applying descriptions of what is depicted in an image are for supplier companies business needs, primarily to help users or customers to find an image they are looking for. Businesses apply rights and licensing data primarily because of legal requirements, but also to protect their companies revenue streams. Administrative data are added to satisfy customer needs.

For photographers, rights are of critical importance

The use of rights data by photographers is more driven by their own business needs than by legal requirements. As photographers are the first party in the supply chain of images they have a high interest to claim who is the creator and the first copyright owner of each creative work. Applying descriptions of the image is driven by customer needs and business needs of photographers. Why administrative data is applied comes also from their business needs and much less from customer needs compared to supplier companies.

IPTC photo metadata – used since 1995

The IPTC photo metadata standard originated in 1995 when Adobe and other makers of image software adopted the IPTC Information Interchange Model (IIM) standard for the panels with fields describing what an image shows, providing the name of the photographer, stating copyright and usage terms, and sharing instructions and more administrative information. In 2005 IPTC published its first Photo Metadata Standard covering fields used by photo professionals and expressed by the IIM format and the then-new XMP format. The IPTC fields were substantially extended in 2008 and since then the standard has been continuously maintained by IPTC, the global standards body of the news media.

For more information, download the full analysis of supplier survey results as a PDF.

IPTC has published an updated Photo Metadata User Guide, for photographers, photo editors and professionals responsible for in-house metadata workflows, including digital asset management (DAM) systems.

Based on IPTC’s widely used Photo Metadata Standard, the new User Guide contains practical information regarding photo metadata – from photographers familiarizing themselves with basics, to managers in related businesses who have a deeper understanding of implementation of standards and metadata.

A key use of metadata is to describe the content of an image, location and rights information; the guide groups metadata fields according to information types. “The User Guide will help when deciding where metadata should be put about a certain topic, and what data should or should not be filled into a specific field,” said Michael Steidl, managing director of IPTC, and lead of IPTC’s Photo Metadata Working Group.

IPTC sets the industry standard for administrative, descriptive, and copyright information about images. The IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, supported by many software applications, is the most widely used standard because of its universal acceptance among photographers, distributors, news organisations, archivists, and developers.

The Photo Metadata User Guide walks users through the major groups of metadata, and for each IPTC field contained within each, it provides short guidelines on the use and semantics.

The first section of the guide outlines practical use for a basic understanding of applying photo metadata, and may be most helpful to photographers becoming familiar with adding it to their photos for the first time. Photo metadata is key to protecting photographers’ images, including copyright and licensing information online.

The User Guide addresses typical questions such as: 

• What is a minimum set of fields to be used?
• How is metadata preserved?

Five examples of metadata for independent, staff, and agency photographers plus images of artwork are given.

Photo metadata is also essential for managing digital assets. Detailed and accurate descriptions about images ensure they can be easily and efficiently retrieved via search, by users or machine-readable code. This results in smoother workflow within organisations, more precise tracking of images, and potential for licensing opportunities.

For professionals responsible for in-house photo metadata workflows and DAM systems, all IPTC metadata fields in the User Guide have been grouped by topic for easy reference: general description, persons, locations, things shown, rights and licensing information, and administrative data.

The User Guide does not focus on the user interface of a specific software, and will be updated regularly to include more details.

For questions about the Photo Metadata User Guide or about becoming involved in IPTC’s work: Contact us.
Twitter: @IPTC
LinkedIn: IPTC

Interesting stats and info about the International Press Telecommunications Council’s technical standards for exchange of news information:

1.) The International Press Telecommunications Council publishes 14+ technical standards that are intended for the business-to-business exchange of news among news agencies, other news providers and publishers.

2.) At least one or two IPTC standards are in use at virtually every newspaper and news web site in the world.
Publishers use IPTC standards to save money and improve the ability of their news products to be used by customers.

3.) IPTC standards for news exchange are available for downloading at no cost – and there are no royalties or fees.
The only source of income for IPTC is membership dues. Membership currently consists of more than 50 organizations and individuals worldwide.

4.) All IPTC standards are designed to be independent of any specific language. 
Although our publications are written in English and meetings are conducted in English, every recent standard is usable by any written language that is supported by Unicode.

5.) More than 70 software applications support IPTC Standards.
Software developers seamlessly integrate IPTC standards into their products – often in subtle ways that are not obvious to customers.

More information:
IPTC.org
IPTC Standards
Contact: Michael Steidl, mdirector@iptc.org

IPTC has secured funding and the foundation for language and technical requirements for its EXTRA Project – a rules-based classification system, as reported at IPTC’s Summer Meeting 2016 by Stuart Myles, project lead and IPTC Chairman of the Board.

EXTRA is the EXTraction Rules Apparatus, a multilingual open-source platform for rules-based classification of news content. EXTRA will allow newsrooms to automatically annotate news content with high-quality metadata subjects using a predefined set of rules. IPTC was awarded a grant from the first round of Google’s Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund to build and freely distribute the initial version of EXTRA.

The EXTRA project team has delivered a road map for the project to Google’s Digital News Initiative, and are finalizing their plans for language requirements and rules, as well as technical requirements and licensing. IPTC will approach existing open source communities, linguists and programmers to facilitate development.

For easy adoption and consistency in the news industry, IPTC is creating rules for tagging documents with its industry standard Media Topics vocabulary, used widely by publishers. IPTC plans to provide example rules for at least two of the languages supported by Media Topics: Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish.

“For small to medium size publishers who are dissatisfied with hand-tagging their content or grappling with complex machine-learning tools, EXTRA is an open-source news classification engine that will let you easily apply rich metadata to breaking news content,” said Myles. “Unlike manual techniques, which can be slow and inconsistent, or traditional statistical methods, which aren’t suitable for breaking news, EXTRA’s rules-based classification will provide fast, consistent and relevant metadata to enrich search, advertising and content analytics.”

IPTC invites other parties to join the development of the EXTRA project. To get involved, contact Myles at chair@iptc.org.

Related Links:
For developers: http://dev.iptc.org/Topic-EXTRA
Road map and project description: https://iptc.github.io/extra/
Press Release

At our three-day summer meeting in Stockholm, 13-15 June 2016, about 30 IPTC member delegates and 10 invited experts networked and discussed emerging issues and challenges affecting technology and the news industry.

Thanks to the several news agencies and vendors who gave examples of IPTC standards as the backbone of their news exchange systems and products:

Mittmedia about its use of APIs, automated creation of text news by text robots, and data-driven journalism; Profium on the use of multicast; VG on integrating newsrooms with product and technology; Infomaker on its Newspilot publishing platform; Swedish news agency TT on their Toolbox and development of digital content, strategies, and new business; Sourcefabric on its Superdesk publishing platform; Journalism++ on robots – when, where why to start; Fotoware on its digital asset management software FotoWeb. Special thanks to Johan Lindgren and TT for helping us navigate Stockholm, as well as coordinate these presentations.

We approved SportsML 3.0, a major upgrade of the premier open standard for sports data, and NewsML-G2 version 2.23 to further refine the most widely-used standard for representing news and events across all media types.

We also talked about ideas for marketing the IPTC and ways to grow our membership. We will increase our discussion of relevant news and events, as well as information about how the IPTC’s work is applied by news companies every day. We plan to produce more hands-on information about photo metadata as, judging from the traffic to our website, that’s something a lot of people are looking for.

A new and exciting way to get involved with the IPTC is EXTRA: The EXTraction Rules Apparatus. We received a grant from Google’s Digital News Initiative to build and freely distribute a multilingual open-source platform for rules-based classification of news content. If that sounds interesting, then get in touch to learn more.

Please consider joining us for our Autumn Meeting in Berlin (24 – 26 October 2016), which will feature a video workshop day, on 25 October. We plan to launch the Video Metadata Hub recommendation, a single set of video metadata properties covering the entire video workflow, including mappings and guidelines for many existing video standards.

If you have any questions about the IPTC or our Berlin meeting, please contact me at chair@iptc.org. I will be happy to discuss the benefits of becoming involved in IPTC or attending our meetings.

Regards,

Stuart Myles
Chairman, IPTC / Director of Information Management, Associated Press
_{Stockholm photo: Jill Laurinaitis}

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.