Metadata Growing Up . . .
By
Ron Rovtar
Stock Asylum Managing Editor
July 18, 2006
Without question, the digital revolution has improved the photography
industry in many ways. Few digital photographers would voluntarily return
to black & white darkrooms and E-6 photo labs. Today's image buyers
consider overnight delivery of slides a quaint relic of a time long
past. Delivery via the internet is quicker, easier and places the product
directly into the buyers computer, which is where the buyer wants it
anyway.
But progress often exacts a toll and the age of digital imaging is no exception. Computer hard drives get clogged with image files. Finding and re-finding images in crowded computers frustrates creative professionals. Licensing information gets misplaced. Copyright infringement reaches epidemic proportions because digital files are easy to swipe.
Despite its many advantages, dealing with the digital age is often a time consuming and confusing puzzle for those who make their living creating, distributing and using digital art.
However, thanks to two stock photography organizations, a central, but
underused piece of the puzzle known as embedded metadata has recently
moved into the spotlight where it belongs. Metadata is textual information
that accompanies digital files like photographs. By attaching copyright
notices, contact information, keywords, captions and other data to an
image, many digital age problems evaporate or become manageable.
Stock Artists Alliance (SAA), an organization of rights-managed photographers, last week issued a "Metadata Manifesto" that calls for industry-wide adoption of metadata and urges photographers to make greater use of the technology.
"Without effective systems in place for identifying and managing digital assets, everyone working with digital images is adversely affected," said SAA in its statement. "Resources are wasted, opportunities are lost, liability increases and intellectual property rights are eroded."
Then the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA), which represents many U.S. stock photography distributors, announced that it will make available a new metadata panel for its members and other image suppliers.
The panel, which should be available in October, will solve problems that plague stock photo distributors who need to keep, manipulate and provide much information that does not properly fit in currently available metadata panels.
 The Picture Archive Council of America has proposed this metadata panel as a solution for stock distributors who need to include specific information with the images they license. Current metadata panels do not meet the needs of distributors, the organization says. |
Though embedded metadata has limitations even when it conforms to the standards published by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), it does solve significant problems for image creators, distributors and image users. In Photoshop metadata is accessed by selecting "file info . . ." under the "file" menu.
IPTC Metadata can be read by a number of graphics and digital asset management programs, so it is a good way to pass important information between various parties in the image supply chain.
Photographers and illustrators use metadata fields for copyright notices and contact information so that their images remain protected under copyright laws and so potential users know where to license the images. Contact information will be especially important if Congress passes the proposed Orphan Works Act, which would allow publication of many copyrighted images when the copyright owner cannot be found.
Even without an orphan works law, lack of licensing and other information can cost artists and their distributors a lot of money.
Some companies license many images, but have trouble tracking all the licenses they purchase, which leads to unintentional infringements when the images are used or re-used in ways not covered by the original license. In other cases, image buyers have scrapped plans to use an image simply because they could not find the copyright owner or stock distributor.
With embedded metadata, publishers, design firms and advertising agencies can use the information in their workflow, saving significant amounts of time and effort. Keywords make specific images easier to find with digital asset management programs, many of which can read the metadata fields.
Some stock distributors are already using IPTC metadata, but are limited because the current information fields were not designed with stock agencies in mind. Corbis and Alamy add metadata to all images downloaded from their web sites and Getty Images has added metadata to its online image previews.
However, because the current metadata fields were designed with image creators and image users in mind, distributors sometimes must use data fields for purposes for which they were not designed. As a result, the distributors sometimes overwrite information entered by artists, which can be a problem for the artists.
"Photographers want to embed metadata, but the agencies want it all in a spread sheet to put it into an archive. They re-embed it when the image goes out," said PACA President Roger Ressmeyer. "Spread sheets include additional data like if the image is model released and if it is royalty-free or rights-managed," Ressmeyer noted.
PACA's new panel should solve most of the distributors' problems if it is accepted by the industry. PACA has asked Adobe Systems to consider including the new panel in future versions of Adobe software like Photoshop and the Bridge, an asset management program that ships with many Adobe software packages.
Ressmeyer said PACA's new panel includes a lot of information that distributors want their clients to know, including the stock agency's name, its phone number, the image's identification number, usage restrictions and model and property release status.
The panel does not include specific licensing information, but the non-profit PLUS Coalition is working on a system to let image buyers track their licenses through embedded metadata.
"In that sense, PLUS is in great measure a metadata initiative," Sedlik added. He said PLUS also is working on a free registry of licenses for artists and licensors.
But, embedded metadata is not a perfect solution for all the problems facing artists, distributors and image buyers.
"A lot of photographers still do not use it," said David Riecks, chairman of the SAA Image Technology Standards Committee, which prepared SAA's Metadata Manifesto. And, many photographers who do use metadata find that different image distributors use different standards for the metadata they accept, Riecks added.
"If all of those people were embracing the same set of standards, you would only have to do it once," Riecks asserted.
In addition, Riecks noted, "There's an awful lot of metadata removal that goes on without people realizing it. He noted out that some common computer programs strip metadata because the software simply does not recognize it.
At the same time, unscrupulous people can easily alter or remove embedded information. This has led some industry observers to propose that certain critical data like the name of the copyright owner be locked once entered.
However, even locked fields are an imperfect solution. Sometimes such information needs to be changed. For example, copyrights can be sold to new owners who will want their name(s) in the copyright and contact fields, replacing information about the original owner.
And, though the information remains locked in the original document, there may be no way to stop potential infringers from digitally copying all or part of an image and pasting it into another document without embedded metadata.
Still, widespread use of embedded IPTC metadata offers huge benefits to the creative industries.
Says the SAA manifesto: "For image users who are downloading images, archiving, and later re-purposing these digital files, the loss of critical information along the way can be detrimental. Without licensing metadata, they cannot determine their rights to use the image. Without contact metadata, they cannot easily inquire about these rights. And without caption metadata, they may not be able to identify who or what is in the image."
"Imagine a world where metadata is ubiquitous," the manifesto continues. "It’s a world where images can be easily located and identified by anyone, anywhere. Creators can transmit their images to distributors and users, who instantly integrate these into their systems. Image users can track their digital assets using fully automated systems."
Imagine.
The SAA web site is at: http://www.stockartistsalliance.org
The PACA web site is at: http://www.pacaoffice.org.
PLUS is at: http://www.useplus.com.
