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SAA's Metadata Blogs

SAA's blogs have highlighted developments in the world of metadata since 2006.

 

Latest Blog Entries:

Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Six Ways to Keep your Digital Images from Becoming “Orphan Works”
...if you are going to share your images in the “World Wild West” here are some ways to make it easier to identify you as the creator/copyright holder of your digital photographs. Taking some (or all of these steps), should mean there’s little chance that you’ll find your images being labeled as “orphan works.” more

Tuesday, March 12, 2013
IPTC study shows Social Media Networks Remove Metadata
According to a new study just released by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), major social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr remove copyright information and other useful embedded data from pictures posted by their users. more

Monday, December 12, 2011
New Site Launched to Encourage Embedding of Metadata
A major initiative to encourage the direct embedding of descriptive and rights information into all manner of digital media has just been launched. Photometadata.org endorses the effort and is helping to spreading the word. more

Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Why can't I insert metadata at the capture stage?
A recent post on the Library of Congress website asks the question why adding information (metadata) to images is so difficult. more

Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Can Embedded Photo Metadata Help Your Website SEO?
A number of recent articles are pushing the idea that embedded photo metadata can boost your search engine ranking. However, while the practice of adding embedded metadata to increase findability and to protect the intellectual property of an image are both good ideas; there is a hitch to this concept from the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective. more

Tuesday, December 1, 2010
Myths about photo metadata?
There are a number of myths or misconceptions that surround the practice of embedding copyright, contact information, and other types of “metadata” into digital image files — like JPEGs, TIFFs, Photoshop, DNG and other Raw files. Take a look at the list of the Top 12 myths about embedded photo metadata and see if you can tell which are fact and which are fiction. more

Monday, October 4, 2010
facebooks new photo sharing fails Photo Metadata testing
While images that can be viewed online in flickr are now up to 720 pixels on the long dimension, they are still being "stripped" of all IPTC, XMP, and Exif metadata! more

Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Photo Metadata Utility Developer Gets "The Big Picture"
The SuperUtils company is one of the first software developers to spell out both pro and con arguments for the removal of embedded photo metadata. more

Thursday, July 15, 2010
IPTC-PLUS Toolkit released by IPTC & PLUS
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and the Picture Licensing Univeral System (PLUS) have jointly developed a plug-in metadata panel for use in Adobe Bridge (CS3 or higher) which allow users to read/write the full set of fields included in the IPTC Core, IPTC Extension and the PLUS metadata schemas. more

Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Having Metadata Export Issues with Aperture 3?
Photographers need to be aware that there are some real concerns regarding how Apple Aperture 3, is writing metadata; especially when these files are viewed by other applications in an imaging workflow. more

Thursday, December 3, 2009
Do Social Media Websites Preserve Photo Metadata?
Do the social media websites or other image sharing services you use preserve your embedded photo metadata after upload? The members of the Controlled Vocabulary forum are attempting to answer that question by conducting a survey of the various services to find out. more

October 17, 2009
Metadata Working Group Releases Verification Test Files
The Metadata Working Group (MWG) offers a new set of tools and Test Files for download to help developers verify whether their applications meet The Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata. more

September 5, 2009
A Big Game Safari of a Different Sort
PDN's Daryl Lang details the steps he took to track down the origin of the photo of the big kitty on the cover of the new Apple OS X release... but neglects to check for metadata. more

July 27, 2009
Riecks named Pioneer of Digital Preservation
David Riecks, project leader for the Stock Artists Alliance Photo Metadata Project is the most recently named Library of Congress "Pioneer of Digital Preservation." more

May 21, 2009
The Secret Life of Photo Metadata
David Riecks presented a key paper on photographic metadata May 7 at at the Archiving 2009 conference in Crystal City, Va. more

Feb 26, 2009
MGW Updates "Guidelines For Handling Image Metadata" to Version 1.01
The Metadata Working Group recently updated their specifications guidance pdf ("Guidelines For Handling Image Metadata") to version 1.01. more

Feb 2, 2009
New Bridge Scripts Restore GPS Metadata in TIFFs
It was reported on the Controlled Vocabulary last fall, that there were issues with GPS data being lost when saving files in the TIFF format using any version of Photoshop. Fortunately, this issue is only with the TIFF file format, and does not affect files being saved in the PSD or JPEG formats (saving TIFF files from Lightroom does not suffer from this same issue. more

Sept 24, 2008
Metadata Working Group releases Guidelines for Interoperability and Preservation of Metadata

A group going by the name of the "Metadata Working Group" made a major announcement at Photokina today and released a document that is designed to help developers by providing best practices on how to create, read and modify a set of core metadata values within digital images that use Exif, IPTC-IIM and XMP. more

Jul 28, 2008
Revised IPTC Core & Extensions Released
The IPTC has approved a new specification of their Photo Metadata Standard. This includes the the slightly updated IPTC Core 1.1 Schema, and the the brand new IPTC Extension 1.0 Schema which complements and extends the set of IPTC Core metadata properties. more

May 19, 2008
Free PHP Scripts Preserve Metadata for Server-Side Image Resizing Processes that Use GD
Laura Cotterman has discovered that resizing images on your website using the popular server-side application GD can inadvertently remove metadata from your image files. As there are many widely distributed PHP scripts for image galleries which resize (or watermark) images with GD, this would create a lot of potential "Orphan Works" and Cotterman decided to do something. more

May 5, 2008
Orphan Works is Back
On April 24, new draft versions of the Orphan Works Act of 2008 were introduced by both Houses of the U.S. Congress. The Stock Artists Alliance has published extensive commentary about Orphan Works, specifically noting the particular problems related to metadata and online distribution of images. more

Apr 29, 2008
IPTC Releases Draft Specification for IPTC Core "Extended"
The draft specification "IPTC Photo Metadata 2008" is now publicly available for review. There have been some minor modifications to version 1.1 of the IPTC Core (released in 2005), however the new IPTC Core "Extended" adds a significant number of new properties which complement and extend the current IPTC Core. more

Apr 30, 2008
Free Metadata Viewer Add-on for Firefox Users
Another handy tool to easily read embedded image metadata is a free Add-on for Firefox users called "Exif Viewer 1.40" that was developed by Alan Raskin. more

Jan 17, 2008
Read Exif, IPTC, XMP & More from your Browser
Not everyone has access to tools that allow them to easily read embedded image metadata, or to discern what type of metadata is hidden within an image file. However, thanks to Jeffrey Friedl, and his online EXIF metadata reader, you can now peek inside image files and check your EXIF, IPTC, XMP, etc. from within any web browser. more

Aug 14, 2007
SAA Receives Award from Library of Congress to Promote Photo Metadata Use and Preservation
The U.S. Library of Congress has awarded the Stock Artists Alliance one of eight partnerships for preserving digital media. The partnerships are part of the $2.15 million Preserving Creative America initiative of the Library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). more

Jun 19, 2007
Working Towards a Seamless Photo Workflow
The IPTC and IFRA held their First International Photo Metadata conference, titled "Working towards a seamless photo workflow on June 7, 2007 in Florence, Italy. The issues discussed in the IPTC Photo Metadata working group White Paper (mentioned below) figured prominently at this event, which attracted over 120 attendees, and was held prior to last week's CEPIC Congress. more

Jun 15, 2007
IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group White Paper Released
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) released the Photo Metadata White Paper in conjunction with the Global Photo Metadata Conference held in Florence, Italy on June 7, 2007. The paper focuses on improvements needed to broaden the scope of IPTC style photo metadata so that it is more useful to those in the stock photography and image archive sectors of the professional photography market. more

Jan 26, 2007
IPTC / IFRA Organize Global Metadata Conference
A first ever Global Photo Metadata Conference is being organised by IPTC (1) and IFRA (2), and will be hosted by CEPIC (3) in Florence, Italy on Thursday, June 7, 2007. This is the first time an international conference has been focused exclusively on photo metadata, and should bring together all interested parties in the photo metadata field, from the camera manufacturer to the photographer. more

Nov 13, 2006
IPTC Software Survey Release
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has just published the results of their survey of various imaging software that support the two IPTC photo metadata standards—Information Interchange Module [IIM] and "IPTC Core." more

Oct 27, 2006
IPTC Surveys Photo Metadata Developers
We applaud the International Press Telecommunications Council for launching their "IPTC Photo Metadata Software Implementation Survey." The IPTC has been at the forefront of photo metadata standards for more than a decade, starting when the IPTC's Information Interchange Model (IIM) standard was adopted by Adobe and others to provide metadata fields in digital image files starting in the early 1990's. more

Jul 26, 2006
Metadata Growing Up?
The article, "Metadata Growing Up" on the Stock Asylum website discusses the introduction by the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) of a Custom Metadata Panel for Photoshop that can be used by image distributors to to keep, manipulate and provide information that does not properly fit in currently available metadata fields. more

Jul 22, 2006
Well Done, iView
We congratulate iView Multimedia for reconsidering their decision to drop support for legacy IPTC metadata. When iView released version 3.1 of iView Media Pro, their application only stored metadata using the XMP/IPTC Core schema, and did not also store the metadata in the older, legacy IPTC (Image Resource Block) format. more