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Archive for the IPTC Category

Flying solo

Anyone can take a picture…that is the lesson Flickr and Microstock has recently taught us with a “pie in the face” method. It doesn’t take that much skills to create images that could use for licensing by someone else. Much less then painting, writing music, writing ( properly) or any other creative activity. Furthermore, technology has really improved the ease of access. Most images that we see today, even taken by pros, could have never existed 15 years ago because cameras, lenses and everything around it was just not that good. However, as much as photography is becoming more and more accessible, great images remain an act of creative magic. And its a talent, if not a gift.

The same goes for licensing images. Everyone claims they can sell pictures. However, it is not true. let’s take a few example, if you don’t mind. Microstock shooters. Sure they can take equivalent quality pictures as your average traditional RF/RM guy. But can they sell it ? Nope. They have to rely on the savvy tech marketing magicians of microstock sites like Istock or Dreamstime to make that happen. They could start their own microstock site with only their image, priced at even lower than any competition and yet see nothing. Ok..not convinced. Well, let’s jump into photojournalism.  We are all familiar with great images that never get published. Why? Because images do not sell themselves. It’s a tragic myth.

More and more, one can see popping up all over the internet, sites build by young geeky entrepreneur offering to let photographers sell direct and cut the “middleman” or agency. They make people beleive the age old myth “if you build it they will come”.  The more independent photographers create independent selling websites ( not the portfolio kind), the more they dilute and isolate their work.

Why do you think a lot of these database site scream high and loud how many images they contain ( 15 million, 43 million, 5 petratrillion..) ? Because they understand that the promise of a wealth of content is more important to most buyers than quality. They are looking for a solution, not a great image. Something that will fit well and appropriately in that space. They couldn’t care less if it was used before, like they couldn’t care less if their care is mass produced and others have the same model with the same color.

Think selling images in a big database is the solution ? wrong again. You can try, but there is no guarantee. Furthermore, the bigger the collection, the more chance your images have to be ignored . Great IPTC info ? Depends on what you call great: what you put in or what those guys in  Bangalore put in ? Or those so self proclaimed expert? Mmm.

So what is it ? Great marketing ? Sure…but do you know what that is ? and how to achieve it ? Probably not. If you did, you would not be reading this but instead, be enjoying a nice coktail on the porch of your summer house looking at the sunset dip into a deep blue sea.

Admit it. You don’t know. You have no idea how to sell images. It takes talent, like shooting great images. Whether learned or natural, it’s not something most photographer have. Great athletes have agents, great actor have agents, why do you think photographers don’t need any ?

Because building a searchable website with a shopping cart is easy, and cheap ? And that, with a kick-ass SEO strategy will make them millionaires? Well, let’s think of who have succeeded up to now…What? no names come to mind? However, photographers with crappy websites ( or none at all) that are doing very, very well…many.

So, next time someone comes to you with a turn key solution that promises to cut the middle man and make you truly independent, you can beleive them, because that is exactly what it will do for you. And nothing else.

For some cheese

      Tired of Orphan works endless discussion ? Fed up about Microstrock, Getty and Google treating photography as a garbage dump ? Bored of reading self-proclaimed photo gurus telling you that “posterity is right around the corner “? Tired of spending gazillions hard earned dollars ( or pesos, or Euros, or Krons ?) on far away workshop with cynical and decadent reporters who need a new camera and couldn’t give a crap what your name is ? Or are you just loosing your eyesight on another overpriced piece of software supposedly made to enhance your workflow but actually puts you that much further from delivering your images on time ?camenbert

Well, if you have a Facebook account ( which, by the way, you should by now), head of to “L’apero du premier Jeudi du mois“. Apparently created by a group of French photographers who just like to have fun, and a drink, once a month  ( on the first Thursday of the month) , it is becoming the place to hang out. Why ? because they have just launched their first photo contest.And unlike PDN or other self righteous photo publication, it is free and fun.

Here are, in a nutshell, the rules.  5 images, coherent, on one topic, which is a pun in French : ” Aperitif: Contact Glasses” . You know, in France, when they go out for drinks, before dinner, they have a beer, or a Kir, or a Ricard, and they wish each other a good health ( “as ta sante”, or “a la votre”) before hitting their glasses together and slipping it away. A good way to push away a bad day and a great way to start an evening. The short photo essay for the contest that runs from March 1 to May 5, should illustrate that.  Simple enough ?

The prizes ? O yes, of course, this is what you win ( if you win):

1 prize : a Camenbert

2nd prize: a bottle of Zubrowska

3rd; Pize : a Ricoh camera

The jury ? : everyone. the images will be posted on Facebook and anyone can vote for their favorite . In June, the winner will be announce. So next time you sit down for drinks with your friends after a long boring day and let your thoughts drift into the friendship space, grab a camera and photograph this precious moment . Who knows, you might win a camenbert.

All info ( in French, for now) at the Facebook page here.

What if ?

The other day we wrote a post about the Plus Coalition. Besides being bombarded by emails from someone who would like to remain anonymous and seeing a post on another blog defending it , there was no reaction to it. It wasn’t a big surprise. If you add those who have never heard about it to those who do not understand what it does and how it works, there is not much people left. Sure, there are the few board members, that include some crooks, who could be more vocal about it, but hey, what’s the point ? It is not going to become the standard for licensing anytime soon.

However, one can see the underlying scheme surfacing a little more. After making an exclusive deal with Picscout for image recognition without even asking for bidding from other image matching technologies, it is now encompassing, slowly, the Creative Common. After all, even free is a license, isn’t it ? And Plus will still make money, as it will still charge a fee to access images in its Registry. The question is why would someone bother to attach a license that they are offering for free, but that is another issue.

Now, the CEO of Creative Common is joining Pic scout as a consultant. The strangling triangle is now fully closed. PLUS/Picscout/CreativeCommon. Everywhere you look, you will be forced to deal with one of the three who will certainly refer one to the other. What will professional photography licensors will gain from this ? Not much besides being forced to pay to play by parasite companies.

On the same topic, I had the great surprise to see that in the video/space, Copyright infringement and rights was moving into the right direction. Probably unknown by many people, YouTube, who has been in the forefront of copyright issues, has come up with a very interesting solution. Call Audio ID or Video ID, this service allows for copyright owners to upload their content so that the automated matching system can compare any other upload to that library. The result ? If someone attempts to upload a video, or a audio linked to a video with our proper clearance, Youtube automatically blocks it. The fee ? Free. The result ? Youtube can now safely add advertising to videos without worrying about copyright issues and Copyright owners do not need to monitor Youtube all day long.

If Plus had been a little bit smarter and less greedy, they would have done the same. Instead of forcing users to do a search on a private registry to check for licenses, their database could continually scan the internet. If someone uploads an image to a site without the appropriate license, a red flag would come up. Since the Plus system does not currently handle location of usage, this is currently impossible to do. Furthermore, it would entail that Plus would not make any money, which is also an absolute no no for them. It is too bad, because with a similar system, a user who would try to upload an image for a site without the proper license would immediately and automatically prompted to contact the copyright owner. It would finally make stealing almost impossible and licensing much much easier.

The beauty of such a system is that it would NOT require a central database. Ones image database could easily work as a registry. The image would call back “home” and check for license information.

However, Plus like other registries, coming or already in place,   is just another business and another reason to suck up pennies from copyright holders. Sure, there are cost but then, why not create a subscription model instead ?

Needless to say, there is still a long way to make images more intelligent and simplify seller and buyers’ life. In the mean time we will have to cautiously navigate the treacherous waters of scammers and potion sellers.

More on Youtbe content ID here

Plus or Minus ?

We hadn’t heard from the PLUS coalition for a while. This loose organization of visual professional who has been tediously trying to create a standard for licensing has suddenly burst out of its silence with two important announcements:

1) The ASMP has dug into its $1,3 Million  fund it had received last year ( we hadn’t not heard of that for a while too) to retrieve $150,000 as a generous gift to PLUS. This adds up to the $85,000 ASMP had already given to the coalition. This probably makes the ASMP the biggest provider of funds to PLUS by far (usually, organizations donate around $25,000). The question is why is the ASMP so interested in PLUS as opposed to fighting Google and its book scanning initiative ? PLUS has made no headway in the last few years and although everyone agrees it could become a useful tool, it has yet to be adopted and put in practice anywhere. It is also quite evident, although never clearly announced, that the PLUS business model is to create a licensing registry that would charge for its usage.  For pennies, indeed, but with billions of licenses happening online worldwide, it can quickly becomes a huge cash cow. Maybe ASMP sees this as a long term investment.

Also, with such a heavy donor, will PLUS feel the pressure to satisfy their needs (those of ASMP)  rather than those of publishers. After all, like in politics, those who have put more in usually see the benefits first.

2) PLUS has chosen Picscout as the exclusive provider of image recognition services to the PLUS Registry . That resembles the deal that PLUS had made with ImageSpan a while back. How does a coalition that is supposed to create a standard make exclusive arrangements with private companies ? It is a bit like the IPTC deciding that the only tool for reading metadata should be made by Adobe ? Image tracking is still in its infancy but yet PLUS has decided that Picscout is not only the best, but the only one? There are companies currently working on similar, if not better solutions that I really doubt PLUS has even approached. What is behind this deal that we are not told about ?

Picscout has recently announced its  Image IRC, which is an image registry who does not to want to say its real name, and has now combine forces with PLUS, another image registry in the making, for more fire power. Both will split the huge potential revenue for access to their overgrowing databases. What will happen soon is that image creators and copyright holders will soon be held captive by these organizations that will become the forced middle man for every licensing transaction.

With investors with mysterious agendas, strange relationships ( Creative Commons), Exclusive agreements ( ImageSpan and now Picscout), it is behaving more like a secret society that keeps its operations in the shade while putting little effort in the wide spread acceptances of its offerings. Not very social.

About stock

So, as it reaches $200 million dollars a year in revenue, Istockphoto is pushing the production of stock photography to its rim. The traditionally strong categories for stock imagery, like Lifestyle, Health, Parenthood, Teens, Green, Business are all being more than very well covered by the astute production of 100,000’s very smart microstock producers. For traditional photo agencies, especially Royalty Free, continuing to produce images in these categories is pure suicide.

But there is not much space at the edges of the stock photography demand. If you are specialized in photographing snails, that is great, but lets face it, the market, even worldwide, cannot be  very big. Sure, you will still be able to command your prices but probably with clients that have little or no budget. So what is the point ?

Even almighty Getty is suffering losses within its traditional stock offering and is probably thinking to shift the whole thing to its new subscription based Jupiter Unlimited model. At least, for a business representing thousands of photographers, that would make sense. What you loose on per image sales, you win on the volume. For individual photogrpahers, it’s a complete loss.

Interestingly enough, the internet has not leveled the playing field. It is as difficult as it was 10 years ago for an image buyer to find the proper images outside of the 3 or 4 top stock photo agencies.  Volume and SEO are  two principal tools for worldwide marketing, both completely unrelated to image quality. Google Image, still being seen as the primary destination to find images is  completely counter productive for professionals as it doesn’t index IPTC ( Some still think it is  a standard) while it it privileges popularity over quality. Some tools, like the new Picscout IRC, are even helping Google Image to enhance its sad dominance over stock image licensing.

If the stock photo industry had any intelligence, it would create it own replacement for Google Image based on its  clients needs. A global image search that would read IPTC and classify images according to relevancy. That would privilege quality over popularity and volume. Sure, it would be a huge project and demand a lot of cooperation from competing businesses. Sure, it would demand cooperation rather than isolation, but the results would benefit everyone. It is probably the only solution the commercial stock industry has left until it disappears under the huge weight of  mass production.

I read the news today, Oh boy…

More annoying things:

- Did you know that Google Books include magazines. Yes, the search giant you like so dearly is currently also scanning  magazines which you  can now read, for free, online. Those include your images. No compensations, not even a simple note asking for your authorization. Did you know that when you licensed that image to a magazine, back in 1994, you were also granting them the right to reproduce your image for worldwide online use ? for free? well, you did. And you even authorized Google, that did not exist at the time, to stick ads next to them and make money.

Google mag

For those, who again, will say ” well, it’s good publicity”, please explain how.

- The GetmetaSmart tour. Currently touring the US to explain to photographers how to include metadata in their files, this tour is full of great intentions. It sincerely tries to promote a wider usage of properly inserting information with every single image that travels. But, seriously, what is the point when anyone can strip it away with no consequences  ? wouldn’t it be wiser to lobby the software industry and the IPTC org to make that metadata safe and password protected?

This tour is like teaching people how to paint their houses with water color. First rain and all will be washed away. Good idea, wrong track.

- A woman copied 24 songs, she gets fined $1.92 million dollars. That is $220,000 a song. Corbis looses 16,000 images, they get fined $7 dollars per image. Justice anyone ? at least the musicians can still make money with these songs, Chris Usher never will .

- If something like the Iranian protests would happen in the US, the media would never use amateur photography. Because it is in Iran, they don’t care.

- Snaptell is bought by Amazon/A9. They encourage people to take pictures of book covers  so they can find a match. Copying a photograph used to be copyright infringement, now its mainstream. What next. Photograph an image you like, upload its settings to you camera and redo the same ? we are not so far, are we?

- NGO’s, Foundations,  Charities are becoming the biggest providers of photojournalism worldwide. Yet, they all have a very clear agenda. How is that compatible with photojournalisms. How is that different then General Electric  sponsoring your next assignment ? Where is my reality, I want it back.

- It’s Friday and some website still pay $5 per image.

Wooz 2 blame

There is something very puzzling about this whole Orphan works bill and what is implied. The gist of it says that if a user cannot identify the owner of an image, he/she can legally use it without suffering a huge penalty. In a nutshell.  Hear me out.

One of the biggest issue here is that it appears to make the owner of the Copyright solely responsible for having his/her work properly credited and making sure it stays that way.

The majority of the time, an image in its digital format, leaves the server of its owner fully captioned and properly credited. Along the lines of production, purposely or not, the metadata gets violently separated from its image. Either by the action of software or by the hands of humans. Sometimes, the credit reappears geographically near the image and stays there. Sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, the copyright owner could find himself smacked in the head with an Orphan Work issue although he took all precautions possible.

Whose to blame ? The publishers. Are they liable in any way ? Absolutely not. Although they can create a troublingcircumstance to a law abiding photographer, they are not legally responsible if they strip the source information from a file. Why is that ? After all, they are the ones who can make a file orphan. They are the ones that cut the copyright umbilical cord.

So, even if a photographer explicitly and tirelessly  informs his images with the proper information, there is no guarantee that it will stay there.

Now, now, you will say. There is the DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act ) that specifically says :

    `(b) REMOVAL OR ALTERATION OF COPYRIGHT MANAGEMENT INFORMATION- No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law–
    • `(1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information,
    • `(2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information knowing that the copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, or
    • `(3) distribute, import for distribution, or publicly perform works, copies of works, or phonorecords, knowing that copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law,
    knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.

Indeed it does create liability. If it is done on purpose. Which is not, most of the time. Simple image manipulation does frequently and inadvertently erase all information . And the image is orphan. Furthermore, for photographers and agencies who license a lot of images, it is impossible to track easily. What, you are going to download all your image used to see if the metadata is still there ? And if not, what exactly are you going to do?  Sue your clients for something they might have not done on purpose. In this economy ?

You get the point. The Orphan works bill might make this clause more frequently used, although, I beleive, a take down is all you can legally request. But its not going to solve the issue.What will, is if our friends who are so desperately trying to create standards, would actually enforce these standards and make it a requirement that no software can and should remove metadata without active participation of a conscious human being. It should actually be a law, or an addendum to the DMA.

it should read : REMOVAL OR ALTERATION OF COPYRIGHT MANAGEMENT INFORMATION- No person OR Software shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law–intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information, bla bla bla..

And any application that interface with images should be DMA compliant and have a great big green sticker on it to claim it. Now, that would solve a lot of issues and make the Orphan Works bill much easier for everyone to accept.

The choice is yours

If you are at CEPIC this week, in the lovely city of Dresden, Germany, here are few people you HAVE to see. If you are not going, no problem, they all have a website too.

WorldAssignement.com: Brainchild of Pierre Pankotay, serial entrepreneur , WA is a new platform that finally brings photo agencies and Photo editors together. On a worldwide level. The idea is simple and the execution brilliant. Say you are a photo editor in one country seeking to get a job done in another country. Thanks to WA, you can do a search on multiple fields, based on your needs, and find the appropriate photographer at the appropriate location with exactly the right skills. Since all the photographers in the database belong to a photo agency, you are guaranteed a pre-screening and not fall on some over confident schmuck.

From now on, it will be easy for a magazine, lets say in South Africa, to find a photographer that has diving skills and speak fluent polish equipped with an Olga for a photo shoot in Brazil. A few clicks away easy. Quality guaranteed. More info at worldassignment.com.

PixTrakk : About to be launched by the team behind Pixpalace France and USA, PixTrakk will finally help photo agencies track usage of their images whether in Print or on the web. Because PixTrakk is created by people who have triple experience in publishing, photo agency and technology, it is poised to quickly become an absolute necessity for any photo agency looking to automated their billing or simply keep track of where their images have been published. A combination of three technology power houses, LTU Technologies, TNS Media and Pixpalace, Pixtrakk will finally give user an option not to use the obscenely expensive PixID from Iphone App company Idee, inc. It is scheduled to be launched in September.

Not sure if they have a table but Keedup, New Zealand  based keywording company, is also  ready to change the market. Already well established in editorial keywording, it has launched a specialized service for celebrity agencies. The concept is revolutionary in so much as not every type of agency should use the same standard of keywords, as it is currently done. The markets, thus researchers, use completely different sets of keywords, depending on what market they work in. Yet most keywording companies apply the same rules whether the images are Sports, news or Commercial Stock. The world is about customization, its about time keywording is too.

Of course, you can also waste a whole day attending the IPTC summit and learn some more nothing about nothing or listen to some heated debate  between people you have never heard about about topics you really do not care about. The choice is yours.

Unapologetic Friday

Here are a few of the most revolting persistent aspect of the photo Industry:

- Blogs that get people fired

- Blogs or magazines written by people that have never ever worked in the Photo Industry yet consider themselves experts on all it’s aspects.

- Photo agencies that do not pay their photographers.

- Photo Agencies that license images under cover of a “Research or Service Fee”.  They simply take images, usually offered for free, and sell them with absolutely no right to do so.

- People that confuse easy to copy with free. It’s not because you can download an image easily that you can use it for free.

- People that use images without asking first.

- Geeks that launch microstock companies every minutes because they can.

- Hackers that spend their days breaking in photo agencies databases and stealing hundreds, if not thousands of images.

- Photographers that think they are photographers because they learned how to properly light a scene.

- Photographers that think they are good because they have been in business for a long time. Persistence is not a measure of quality.

- Photo agencies and photographers that price their images with their feet. The photography business is like driving a car, if you don’t know what you are doing, you are a danger for the rest of us. Please step out.

- Corporations that beleive they can control everything. They can’t.

- Corporations that hire non photo people and bring them in this industry. They wouldn’t survive a minute, and they don’t, if they were not working for these companies.

- Companies that have been loosing money for 20 years and are still in business. Why not use the money for useful purposes instead of feeding useless “corpocrates” ( that is an invented word for : Corporate and Bureaucrats).

- Photographer and Agencies that beleive in Say’s Law : production does not automatically create demand. Quantity is not the motor of success. The Photo agency business is not a freakin Lottery.

- Photo consultants that tell you they have the key to success and tell you to take better pictures and charge you for that. Duh !!

- Big Companies threatening photographers if they work for a competing agency.

- Photo Festivals that are just an excuse for someone to cash in some nice sponsorship money and have their hands kissed like a G~d for a week.

- Those endless photo competitions that are really just an excuse for a company to make money.

- Slides shows online that don’t work or are badly done.

- Websites from Big Publishing companies  that say they have no budget for photos.

- People that say ” Well, everyone else has accepted that price”. I really couldn’t care less how dumb other people can be. And, last thing I want to do is be associated with them.

- Photo Associations that rack up as many members as they can so they can get sponsorship money. Yet, they do absolutely nothing to help their members.

- Organizations that try to create standards and end up creating extremely useless and complicated monsters. They never use what they preach on a daily basis , so why would they care?

- Photo Galleries that exhibit the same photographers or photographs over and over again.

- People that beleive that Google will save them.

- Software that are not even compatible with each other.

- Iphone Apps. Enough already. Not everything needs to end up as an Iphone App. It’s just not that cool anymore.

- Geeks that think they know better.

- Exact Image Search websites that return no result for images, although you have seen the image a  hundred times. And they don’t even crawl photo agencies, which could be useful for people looking to license an image.

and finally, I have to stop somewhere, those photographers that pollute our visual space with their crap.

Where is the Standard ?

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 !!