April 29, 2008 by pmelcher.

Google is thinking about changing its Image search algorithm. Currently it has a convoluted way to return results. As you probably already know, its a basic “text” search which looks at the file name, “alt” comments and words around the image to declare an image a valid candidate to a search. Meaning that if you search for “cat” for example and someone has named an image of a truck “cat.jpg”, has put the description in the “alt” comments as “cat, cat and more cat” all that around an article about how great his cat is, then that image of the truck will appear in your search.

Not very efficient, is it ? And as previously written here, the image could be completly out of focus and grainy, as long as it meets all the requirement for Pagerank, it will appear high up in the results.

Called “PageRank for Product Image Search” and presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing by two Google staff engineers, it is aim at becoming the new VisualRank.

Claiming to be an image recognition system and using advance object recognition, here is what it does. It scans all images and looks for patterns, regardless of what object is in the image. After a while, it will see that some images or at least part of the image have the same pattern . Those will be linked. The image or images that have the most similarities with all the others will be pushed to the surface.It gives you a result like that :

See that image in the middle ? It contains all the attributes of the others, thus its the most relevant.

If applied this will create a headache for the photo business. Since this search is really made to search for products to purchase and not for images to license, it is counter productive for our industry. It will not return the best image, the most liked or the most striking, only the most banal, the most common. Ouch !

It will favor non exclusive images, think RF and microstock, over RM images. It will enhance the most used images not the best ones. It will slowly bring IPTC kewording to obsolescence.

In order to bring traffic to its website, a photo agency or photographer will have to post  images as much as possible everywhere all the time.The same image. Thus an image with a lot of various usage will be the star, while news images, who usually have a shorter life-span, will not score well. But an image of a spoon might become a superstar. Especially if it is sold everywhere

Google hates photography. Or rather it sees  it as a tool, not as an art. Another way to index the world.It will become harder to find great images with Google and that will continue to open a door wide open for anyone looking to create a search engine for photography with a ranking system based on quality and relevancy. An image search and not a visual search.

More on the emmerging proposal at Techcrunch.

Posted in IPTC, Search, technology, keyword, google, filter, flickr, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

 Ever since I wrote the piece “orphan work is good for you”, I have been slammed with emails which all pretty much revolved around the same issue : Orphan work bill is a open door for Copyright Infringement and the legalization of free usage.

First and foremost, I keep on refering my readers to a very concise and readable link created by the Copyright Office . In no way do they propose or would facilitate free usage. It is not their intend. It is also quite admirable that they have, and will continue to hold hearings  to listen to all and everyones concerns.

But the most important, to me, is to see that Canada has had a Orphan Work bill in effect since 2005. Quite effective, it requires the potential user of an Orphan image, after proving its good faith in researching the copyright owner,  to be granted a license by the Copyright office. It has happened  only 19 since  then. Granted, Canada is not as big as the United States, but 19 is almost not worth a second look.

Furthermore, the Canadian law leaves 5 years after the license has been granted for the owner to retrieve his/her license. It is still early to see if this provision has ever been used by anyone.

The copyright office, and any all serious image licensor know very well that technology can be a very serious ally in copyright protection. Regardless of any petition and whining, the bill WILL pass.

As said before, It will be a great  incentive for everyone to respect metadata more seriously  and for the photo industry to finally grow up.

Posted in idee, Canada, focus, technology, copyright, license, web 2.0, keyword, IPTC, law | Print | No Comments »

April 2, 2008 by pmelcher.

A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done.

Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image:

After two days, the image was finally tagged with two words: “Pool” , “Man”. I guess that is what you get for free. Furthermore, when I downloaded the image, I could not find the keywords anymore…There is nothing automated about this service. It is currently impossible for a computer to recognize  the content of an image. The most advanced systems I have seen have a 10% success rate, and then again with very contrasted and simple pictures. Tagcow uses a little known service offered by Amazon call the Mechanical Turk. With this service, anyone can put a long, painful task and offer to pay for human beings to fulfill them

“Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it”. At 0.01 cent a picture, one can get images keyworded for cheap. However, the quality is not guaranteed.

Thus it is the power of the masses used here, making more obvious why they picked a cow for their name. Not the brightest animal in the land

Posted in No sense, Search, copyright, IPTC, keyword, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, filter | Print | 2 Comments »

March 13, 2008 by pmelcher.

We have to take responsibility for our actions and our businesses. Once again, shields are raised and emotions are running high. The Orphan work bill has been resurrected.

In a nutshell, if passed, the Orphan Work bill would allow anyone to use a photograph, for free, after proving that a reasonable effort was made to find the copyright owner. In an earlier post, I had suggested that instead of making it free, those orphan images should be licensed properly and the money send to a central organisation that would use those funds to continue looking for the copyright owner.

At least, that way, people would continue to know that any image has to be licensed properly. Regardles of this proposition, this bill would be a good bill. For two main reasons:

- It would finally force photographers and agencies to properly credit their images with well filled IPTC fields. There are thousands of paying or free tools out there that allows anyone to enter its information. There is absolutely no reason why people continue to ignore it. Furthermore, a lot of agency website currently cut down the size of an image to display them as thumbnails, erasing all IPTC data in the process and thus creating an Orphan work. This has to stop. As content creators, artist, it is their duty to secure the information on copyright, not the buyers.

With the risk of having their images used for free, maybe, just maybe, they will pay more attention.

- It will create new technologies : there will be a whole new market to help find image copyright owner. an image search tool, for example, where you could upload a copy of the photograph you have in your possession and it will find all other usage of the same image, leading you hopefully to its legal owner.

Furthermore, other technologies will soon come available, like embedded watermarks or automated tagging directly build in the camera. It already exist in many pro cameras, but once again, no one really uses it.

It is a bit sad that this industry needs a kick to take seriously the matter of image ownership. But, fortunately, it will happen if the Orphan Works bill passes and that, my dear friends, would be a great thing.

Posted in idee, focus, technology, copyright, license, keyword, IPTC, Search, google | Print | 1 Comment »

January 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

We are all getting fat. let’s face it, we are gaining weight and it doesn’t seem like it is going to change. When we were dealing with slides and prints, we needed to physically move. We needed to get up and get the images in drawers, got to a lightboxe, compare the images, put the slide in sleeves, and get them ready for a messenger to pick up. Depending on the size of the photo agency, the traffic department was either close by or a few flights of stairs away. Even photo editors had to be “on the move” as editing required a combination of many physical steps.

Today, from the moment  we sit down in front of our computer screens with a coffee and a bagel  (or anything that will serve as a breakfast), turn on our screens, we hardly move. With a combination of tools, from phone to browsers, we hardly have to move. Thus we are getting fat. I am sure if you look down at your midsection right now, you will see a sign that you are gaining some unneeded volume. We barely move to get to a conference room where we cautioulsy sit down again to listen or talk with our peers who are also gaining weight.

Starring at the glare of our screens for more than eight hours a day, switching from e mails to photographs, news websites to blogs, our eyes are also becoming weaker. Hard to find someone working in this business who doesn’t wear glasses. Although our eyes are our weapon of mass destruction, they are slowly declining on us , as we abuse them hours on.

And of course our skins are not looking better either. We barely see daylight anymore as we hardly have any reasons to be outside. Only photographers escape this doom fate, as they still need to move to create their art. They  are, however, still constrain to the  mischievous chair and screen combination while they caption, photoshop, upload their images for hours on.

And the future doesn’t look much better. As we get more and more wirelessly freed from our offices and work more from home, we might decide not to wash so frequently, let alone take care of our forever growing  hair. We might decide that eating three times a day is not enough, thus enjoying a permanent flux of food. We might not have any need to get out of bed that often as all our necessary tools of the trade may be at arms reach.

Paca, Cepic, Asmp, APA, SAA, PLus, ASPP and all other organizations should vote for a mandatory gym membership for all employees of our industry. We should lobby our respective governments to put in place salvation laws that would require a minimum of one hour of forced exercise to all those wishing to work in the photo industry . Finally, we should  put in place motivational points of interest in our offices in order to force more activities than just going to the bathroom.

Otherwise, my dear friends, we might become instinct before we get to see the full effect of Global Warming.

Posted in IPTC, magazine, technology, keyword, web 2.0, photoshop, filter, photojournalism, editorial | Print | No Comments »

January 16, 2008 by pmelcher.

Not all is bad in the web 2.0 world. Take this new initiative by giant hosting site Flickr. It has posted a part of the huge Library of Congress collection to get some help in key wording for future generation to enjoy. It even has created a new copyright/license for it called “no known copyright restrictions” : “[That does] not mean the image is in the public domain, but do indicate that no evidence has been found to show that restrictions apply.”

The Library of Congress, if you are not aware, is a huge repository of documents related to the history of the United States of America and thus, partly, the world. Most of its content has been donated in a deliberate act to make it accessible and available to the public. Unlike a commercial photo agency, the Library of Congress is not in the business of licensing its content for a fee in order to make some profit but to allow anyone with any curiosity to learn from its document. for free. This project of asking for anyones help to tag, or keyword the images is a great idea, “awesome” some would say, that will allow to share knowledges on line.

I do apprehend already some photo agencies, mostly outside the USA, downloading some of these images and making them available to their clients via a “research” or “service” fee, like they currently do with NASA images or images released by movie studios. Since there is no apparent copyright owners and these images are old, chances of being found and sued by copyright owners are slim to none, they will think.

By making this project as public as possible and by educating the as many as possible, we can put a damper on those who give our industry a bad name. Now, go and tag !

UPDATE :Just what I feared, Apparently Rohn Engh  does want you to take those images and sell them according to his entry in Black Star Rising. I guess that is the new good advice for photographers : if your images do not sell,  steal some public domain and resell them. Treat your clients like idiots and charge them for images they could have found themselves.

Posted in keyword, IPTC, Search, license, web 2.0, flickr, law, france, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

January 11, 2008 by pmelcher.

A funny thing happened recently. One of the top microstock agency, Dreamstime, has decided to lift part of the veil on sales data. As an additional tool given to their contributor, they are now showing what keyword generated a download, thus a sale, of their image.

It is a great tool for contributors, albeit a double edge one. One could be tempted to use it for “keyword spamming”, the art of putting the wrong keyword to an image, in the hopes it will be seen, and eventually bought. A plague for microstock platforms. But what is new and challenging is Dreamstime decision to share part of its sales data.

The history of photo agencies and most recently sales platform has always been the opposite. In order to keep contributors with them, no one shared valuable sales data. It was, and is, proprietary information. A bit like enslaving someone by depriving him of knowledge. Getty, Corbis or JupiterImages, along many, many others would never dare make such a move for fear that their contributors would use that information to feed someone else, such as the competitions’ image database. And that will happen to Dreamstime, since exclusive contributors are maybe around 10% of their pool.

In a slide and phone world, that would have been quasi impossible . Requests for images did not come in the form of one or a sequence of one words. Thus photo agencies would have had a very hard time sharing that information. With websites, all this is different, obviously. But it still remains a very well guarded secret.

The real question is how is this useful ? Well, for one, it will bring a succesful microshooter valuable data on what types of keywords are entered for search. And which ones are the most entered and referred to their images. It will not, however, give a full picture. And that can be highly deceiving. It is not because I sold 100 images thanks to the keyword “butterfly” that this keyword is the most used in searches. It just probably means that I have the most relevant images of butterflies. Since it will not give all keywords, it will not help putting keywords you forgot to put in. For example, if my specialty is photographing fruits and I systematically forgot to put the keyword “fresh”, it will not show me how many sales I missed, if any.

Contributors reaction to this tool has been overwhelming positive and I command Dreamstime for making this available. It is a gutsy move to give photographers access to their sales data. It might, or will, force other microstock companies to do the same. Eventually, it might even force traditional agencies to follow and share more of their information. Their is a value for photographers to be less blind to the markets demand, while there is danger in using past sales to predict or influence future sales. It is not because a keyword has done well in the past that it will do well in the future and the risk is having more of the same image ad nausea. But this is more in a trend that is seeing more power given to photographers. And that is a good thing.

ON a completely unrelated note : Digg.com labs has released a image visual tool which allows to see, real time, what images are being voted. It has no practical usage that I can see but yet is very interesting.

Posted in Search, IPTC, Jupiter, digg, technology, keyword, web 2.0, getty, Royalty free, corbis, filter, prosumer, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »

January 5, 2008 by pmelcher.

The next big thing will be a photo agency that distributes all other photo agencies. And independent photographers. Think about it. When Getty Images entered this market, it was with the simple idea to aggregate the content of multiple photo agencies that they viewed as too disperse. To regroup into one location the content of many small agencies. To consolidate. At the time, the technology would not allow for any other model than to place this content into one giant server and index it. So Getty went about to acquire and combine.

With the advent of Google, we now know that this is no longer necessary. One can do a search over millions of websites from one location without hosting any of the content. Google Images shows us a glimpse of what could be done with photography. Instead of spending millions of dollars into content creation and hosting, a carefully crafted company would index the millions of licensable images worldwide and make them available for purchase from one location.

No need for hosting, acquisition, database management and everything else that is very costly. No editors, indexers, no imaging, none of all these costly human beings that complain a lot. Already Getty and Corbis have taken baby steps into this formidable market. Using the old model of a central server, they license material from agencies they have no control over. Mostly in Royalty free, but also in niche sectors. Science Faction or Minden Pictures are good examples. Corbis does same with EPA and others.

But on the horizon are coming very strong alternatives. Spffy from stockphotfinder.com creator Randy Taylor is one candidate while in Europe, Picturemaxx has already cornered the German market. Spffy is still very young and incomplete but is on the right track, while PictureMaxx only needs to be internationally adopted to dominate the market. Both have understood that you leave the content where it is but you make it simple and easy to find.

They are consolidating the industry without spending one penny on acquisition. The key, obviously, remains to build the appropriate search engine that will retrieve the right images from millions of potential candidates. Too many irrelevant results and the image buyers will leave. That is a huge challenge when you do not have control over the metadata who, furthermore, is in no way standardize.

There are ways to solve this which I will not discuss here. Acquisition will soon be an event of the past while distribution partnership will become more of the norm. Getty and Corbis will continue to try to position themselves as those unavoidable distributors, cutting as many exclusive deals as they can. Because the only way to beat such a system is to have an exclusive compelling content and refuse to be indexed.

Why is this a good thing? Well for once, smaller agencies ( in size and volume of images) will be able to compete at the same level. No longer will the pricing or heavy marketing be a decisive factor but rather the image quality. Since everyones image will be comparable to every one else’s, the competition will be more on image relevancy. If that is the exact image needed, then it will sell, regardless of its price or source.

It should makes the price war less relevant. It might destroy branding, which would become quite obsolete after a while, thus easing on the cost of marketing.

Finally, and depending on the politics and ethics of the winning company, create a mega photo agency that could reign as a despot over the industry or a  coop that would share sales data and keyword entries in order to increase the content relevancy.

At the end, as always, the customer, the image buyers will decide.

Posted in Search, IPTC, license, technology, picturemaxx, google, web 2.0, getty, corbis, filter, flickr, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

December 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

As much as I could understand the music industry for trying to stop the free for all downloads initiated by the old Napster , as much as I can’t agree with the Recording Industry Association of America latest move:

According to the Washington Post of December 30, 2007 : ‘In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.”

The RIAA says you cannot make a copy of your legally purchased music unto another medium.

This is important because the RIAA is using the same laws as we use in the photo industry. And the RIAA is giving copyright laws a bad rep. Under the same principle, it would be the equivalent of  suing a publisher for scanning one of our slides.

I am all for copyright protection and believe that the laws should be unforced but there is a limit to how to interpret the law. There is also the need for old businesses to adapt with the current times and find a better way to handle new challenges, not bigger threats.

The photo industry doesn’t have such an organisation as strong as the RIAA. The closest we have is CEPIC or PACA, none of which is allowed to take any legal action on behalf of its members. Even if they had, I would doubt that they would go suing their customers for making a copy of an image they just purchased. How else would they be able to send it to the printer or designer ? As long as those copies remain in the belly of the beast and are not exposed, we keep our eyes shut and our mouth closed. It is not legal but no harm is done, so who cares ?

The RIAA, but its actions will soon trigger a backslash that will affect anyone who uses copyright laws. The winners will be the “Commoners”, those who have been promoting free exchange as other where promoting free sex back in the 70’s. The San Fransisco based Electronic Frontier and Creative Commons who are still flying high from the pot and acid left overs. Those who see themselves as the cool dudes that will finally create the ephemeral idealistic society where everything is free and traded.

There is not much the photo industry can do while we wait for the pendulum to swing back in our faces and force us to change our policies. Without choosing camps, we will very soon be the bad guys as we will be swallowed in a vicious battle of digital rights and grabs. We will probably have to give up more than we wish, or can, before we can emerge. Or we can set our own rules. Clearly, simply and with efficiency.

We can separate ourselves from the RIAA and shark eating lawyers and specify our own code of conduct that clearly specify what can and cannot be done with our images. Post it loud and clear on our sites and in our communications. This is what we stand for and this is what we authorize you, our customer, to do.

An iniative as worthy, and useful, as the PLUS Coalition.

Happy 2008 !!! May all your wishes become true and your resolutions become reality.

Posted in IPTC, license, copyright, web 2.0, CEPIC, law, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

December 17, 2007 by pmelcher.

A rather big parallel universe to the photo industry is the copyright industry. According to the Copyright Alliance, “The U.S. core copyright industries accounted for an estimated $819.06 billion or 6.56% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005.” That, of course, includes music, graphic, video on top of photography. One has to assume that this number is about copyrighted and licensed products.

No wonder it has become a battlefield. On one side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its followers who preach that the internet and everything on it should be free and exchanged. Its a virtual world, after all, and all content should be distributed equally as to facilitate new creations. A global, unrestricted mash up. They are behind the Orphan Work bill and would probably like to see copyright laws disappear entirely, at least on the internet. Not a completely insane proposition if you believe that there is more to life than making money and that we could all be more creative if we did not have to worry about our budgets. I get to use your image and you get to use mine. We share. It would be great if photographers and agencies where also in the business of creating websites for consumers. But besides Getty and its upcoming Jamd.com, none are. Since photography is a raw material, like oil, and used in the process of creating something new, like a magazine, book, or ad campaign, it is hardly exchangeable. But, regardless, the free-for-all, “private property is evil”, lets trade community is here to stay.

On the other side, you have those who would like a piece of the pie. Take Creative Commons, for example. Currently a non for profit organization that has managed to raise a lot of money since its creation. By redefining how work of art can be used, albeit in a very simple way, it is positioning itself to become a major and inevitable player in this field. Right now, it is entirely free to use, making it extremely viral. But just think that even if they charged 1 cent ( euro, canadian, US or other, you decide) how much would that generate. If they grabbed just 1 % of the copyright industry, it would be $8 billion a year. And that is for the US only.

Besides the CC, the photo industry is familiar with the PLUS coalition, also in the same space. PLUS intends to charge a fee per license used. Recently, the very rich and powerful newspaper industry has also launch its own standard, the Open Access Data. Without going into long and boring details, it is obvious that whomever manages to create a worldwide standard will be sitting on a mega goldmine.

Where does that leave the photo industry that solely depends on copyright to defend its turf ? Well, depending on who wins the “copyright/license definition” battle the outcome will be completely different. But one can already envision a not too distant future where, one way or another, every image licensed on the web will have an additional fee that will have to be paid to one of these “Standard license owners”. Probably a “service fee”, it will resemble a tax on copyrighted material and proceeds will go in the pockets of those who have no other creative talent then bending the rules in their favor. The idea is simple : you create a standard and you make people pay to use it.

Most people would enjoy paying for a service that simplifies the licensing model and will not mind. If it makes RM licensing easier ( as easy as RF !!), it is sure to attract more buyers to the game. Considering the volume, the fee will probably be extremely low per transaction. Imagine, getting a fee for every image licensed on the web. Quite an income, isn’t it ?

Posted in Search, license, copyright, Plus, IPTC, prosumer, law, transaction, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »