IPTC Releases Photo Metadata White Paper

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.

The IPTC, based in Windsor, England, is a consortium of the
world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry
vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used
by virtually every major news organization in the world.