Where is the Standard ?

May 15, 2009 by pmelcher.

There is no standard in photography captioning and metadata. That lossless group of taxonomist geeks who have been mismanaging the IPTC organization  have made a mess of the whole thing and its getting worse. Someone should get fired for good.

Not only IPTC is not a standard, it is now being implemented properly by anyone. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Every single one photo application you open these days has a different header for the same fields . Depending on what software you are using, the fields have different names ? why is that ? where is the standard ? Should you ever want to educate someone on how to properly caption his/her pictures, it is impossible as you cannot even exchange proper field name’s with them.

At the time when there is more images exchanged and used  worldwide, it is impossible to write or read metadata in a standardized way. It is as if this was invented and managed by Microsoft employees : a mess with no logic and practicality whatsoever.

Someone with a brain should take this organization over  and really do some productive work instead of spending time in 8 hour long session explaining to people how a standard is not standardized. And it really doesn’t matter who does it, but lets stop the massacre.This is ruining everyone’s work .

Lets have a simple 6 fields entry that would be the exact same for all software application that would contained the minimum information necessary, like copyright, description, contact info, date, location and keywords.  Make them stick to the image regardless if it is cropped, resized, altered, spit on, whatever. The metadata should travel with the images like its pixels.

And that is it. After that, you can attached EXIF , XMP, Word, Side cars, Dublin beer  and your dog to it, should you want.  Who cares ?

look at that :

“QCode:
A special IPTC format to express the code of a concept which was introduced with the family of G2-Standards. Typical for the format is having a string, then a colon, and finally another string. As the G2-Standards require to have potentially long strings as globally unique identifiers the major goal of QCodes are to shorten them and to make the controlled vocabulary visible this code pertains to. The format of a QCode is in short: “short name for the controlled vocabulary”:”code of the concept” like e.g. subj:06011000 “

who has time for that crap ?

KIS : keep it simple, you geeks !! Simple, useful and agreeable to use . We do not need to know the shoe size of the the photographer. Complicated does not mean intelligent. It just means complicated. And software developers, if you do not stick to the standard than go play somewhere else, we will not use your products. Go mess with someone else’s mind.

As the CEPIC members are about to sit in their chairs for eight long hours to listen to a bunch of nerdy taxidermist talk about field #110 and how it took them 15 meetings to agree on what it should do, they should start a revolt and throw their chairs at them.

Field #110 ? who has the time to fill 110 fields for every images ?  What is wrong with these people ? do they ever caption images themselves ? Certainly doesn’t look like it.

Enough blabbering, IPTC people ! 6 fields, all named the same way and that is it !!

Posted in technology, commercial stock, No sense, IPTC, keyword, CEPIC | Print | 3 Comments »