TOKYO – Japan
- 6 June 2007 -- Building better ways to catalogue and
search for images has led to an important white paper
just approved by the International Press Telecommunications
Council.
At its annual general meeting held in Tokyo last week,
more than 50 IPTC delegates from around the world unanimously
approved publication of the Photo Metadata White Paper.
It outlines photo work flow at many types of agencies
that buy, sell and use images, and offers crucial suggestions
for expanding the amount and types of metadata that are
embedded in photos. The white paper targets the entire
photo industry, not just journalists.
"Anyone who works with photos professionally needs
to read this IPTC white paper," said Walter Baranger
of The New York Times. "For nearly 15 years, the
current IPTC photo header has been in virtually universal
use in news photos worldwide and enjoys astonishingly
wide support outside the news industry. But such important
issues as indexing multimedia packaging and rights management
have led to a consensus at IPTC that it's time to add
important new features. This paper outlines the problems
and solutions, and its applicability to video and other
multimedia is obvious."
The white paper is available at no cost from http://www.iptc.org
Its publication comes shortly before the 1st International
Photo Metadata Conference in Florence, Italy, on 7 June – more
information available at http://www.phmdc.org.
Held in conjunction with CEPIC Congress 2007, this event
is organized by two major news industry organizations,
IPTC and Ifra, and is sponsored by Adobe Systems Inc.
In other business at the IPTC general meeting, members
unanimously re-elected Stephane Guerillot of Agence France-Presse
as their chairman, and elected an international slate
of directors. The meeting was IPTC's largest gathering
in its 43-year history and it was hosted by NSK, the
Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association.
The IPTC membership roll continues to grow as its work
expands in such diverse fields as sports results, event
databasing, and text and image metadata. At this meeting
the IPTC membership also agreed to launch a public testing
phase for two of its new members of the family of G2-Standards:
NewsML-G2 and EventsML-G2.
Our membership's growth, especially in Asia, shows that
IPTC's standards are needed now more than ever, " said
Michael Steidl, the IPTC's managing director. "The
Internet has caused the news industry to make rapid changes
toward multimedia business. This effects the way it packages
and presents journalism, and our standards are making
sure that technical and language barriers don't stand
in the way."
The next regular meeting of the IPTC will be held in
Prague, Czech Republic, in October 2007.
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