Second international

Photo Metadata Conference

"Metadata for Better Business"

5 June 2008

9.30 - 17.00 hrs
St. Julien, Malta (Europe)

The Conference was successfully held and brought together speakers from different sectors of the photo business with professional photographers, managers of media content businesses, system vendors, or leads of trade-organisations in the audience.

Most of the talks given at the conference are available for download on the Programme page.

And these were the topics if the conference:

Metadata are critical to photo business by providing important information about the image and by describing it properly. The maximum added value will only be achieved if the metadata are precise and reliable. But how can we apply metadata to avoid ambiguity and misunderstandings among our customers?

The Photo Metadata Conference will demonstrate improving your business through the proper use of metadata:

• "Keywording versus Controlled Vocabularies":
  What are the advantages for business of the two methods of keyword provision?
  Where can flexible keywords excel and in which cases can terms from controlled vocabularies support your business better?
  .
• Software support for better metadata input:
  Technology should assist humans in their business tasks - and this should also apply for metadata input. But where do current software products fall short of this goal, and what are good examples of input support?
  ...
• Identifying photos:
  Every photographer and photo librarian wants to clearly indicate: "This is my photo". In the interests of copyright protection, copyright owners want unique identifiers in the image helping to locate it on the world wide web. At what stage should these be produced, and what are the options for protecting this information? This session will discuss the issues surrounding the production and use of global identifiers and the registers needed to support them.

The Photo Metadata Conference 2008 will also follow up on what has been achieved since last year's conference:

• First public presentation of the refurbished IPTC Core and a new IPTC Extension set of photo metadata.
  ...
• A presentation from the Stock Artists Alliance on the use of metadata by the major stock distributors.
  SAA runs a project to teach about and encourage the use of embedded metadata by photographers.