June 3, 2009 by pmelcher.

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.

Posted in idee, magazine, technology, commercial stock, celebrity, IPTC, CEPIC, web 2.0, keyword, HOLGA, editorial | Print | No Comments »

May 29, 2009 by pmelcher.

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.

Posted in license, IPTC, idee, Plus, commercial stock, technology, keyword, google, editorial, corbis, finance, PACA, photoshop, slideshow, getty | Print | No Comments »

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 »

May 13, 2009 by pmelcher.

Who owns the news ? The ongoing debate between news outlets ( AP, NYTimes..) and mash ups ( Google news..)  has made this question surface. Is the first one reporting the news the owner of that news ? That used to be the accepted tradition.

Now with Twitter, Facebook, im , sms, blogs and Attention Deficit Disorder ( ADD) at all time high, it is almost impossible to say who was the first to report it. The written word has the weakness of being very volatile and impersonal ( not linked to the person who wrote it ). No one really remembers where and when they read an article about a news item. What matter is the story itself, not where it was reported.

Difficult to own any news, under these circumstances.

Some news can be owned. Great interviews, for examples. Those that reveal something new ( I beleive a whole movie was recently made about an historical interview ). The journalist creates the news and thus can claim ownership of it.

Photography is different. Many, many examples show us that the photograph is the news. Without the image, there would be no news. The photograph has to travel with the information to make it news. Thus, ownership is much clearer.

Why does it matter ? because the internet is all about  content. It is the raw material that fuels website. Twitter or Facebook, two of the hottest website these days, along with Google or Myspace would not be anything without content. Thus the owner of the content is the real powerhouse here, not the technology operator.

There are two types of of news photographers:

Those who report and those who create news. Those who report are those that will go at a press conference, shoot a few head shots with a microphone and file the story. They do not own the news, they just merrily illustrate it. They call themselves news photographers but they are only news illustrators. Their live is filled with events to cover, at a certain place and at a certain time.They can never claim to be the owner of a news item.

Then there is the photojournalists. They have no idea what they will cover next because, like  real journalists, they ignore press releases and agendas. They want and need to break the news. They will find a story and write about it with their camera.. The story becomes their photograph. They can even make news within a news. There are many example during the Vietnam war, for example. They didn’t discover the war, they discovered how it was made.. and shocked the world in the process.

Whoever owns the raw material ( remember Rockefeller ?)  is in power. If you can’t, owning the channel of distribution , you know the pipelines, is second best ( Google and Getty images know that very well). Because of the extreme dilution of the raw material ( think User generated Content), it is quasi impossible to have a monopoly on the raw material itself. However, there is no problem with owning the distribution channels.

The interesting challenge here is when ownership of the raw material ( think photography here) will come back on the hands of the creators. When copyright can be tracked much better?  When the flow of images is no longer controlled by the pipeline owners ? Will that ever happen ?

Posted in copyright, license, celebrity, magazine, technology, IPTC, google, transaction, photojournalism, prosumer, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »

March 3, 2009 by pmelcher.

“Copyright owners tend to focus on the aspect they see of piracy, which is the lost revenue. They therefore think what drives users to do it is the desire to get something for free. But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.” From Paul Graham_Why TV Lost_

Al thought written more for music and video, the above quote is true for photography. The next big step is figuring how to monetize the huge demand for visuals while avoiding piracy. No numbers officially exists on how many images are “stolen” either by a simple “copy paste”, “save as” or database hacking.  Agencies, as well as independent photographers will never admit publicly on how many of their images are floating around without being properly licensed.

A few solutions are slowly emerging but they offer more a reaction rather than an offer. Piscout, for example, will help you after the fact as well as Tineye.com. Imagespan, Gumgum, Piccapp, and others to come, offer an option, but not a solution. Most  copyrights owners are still hoping that metadata will save them, forgetting so conveniently that it can be so easily stripped away. Finally, organizations like the dying Plus Coalition are trying to  standardize archaic and complicated options in the ultimate hope to freeze in time antiquated models. None are making licensing easier.

Rather, by proliferating in multiple directions, these companies (who do not own any copyright) confuse and distract the marketplace even more. What we need is to encourage consumption, not add more leashes. And, as such, stop making our images so incredibly difficult and complicated to purchase. The microstock sector, taking cues from the traditional RF sector, has succesfully understood how important it is to empower the customer with a simple, smooth process.

That is the next evolution of our industry.

Posted in idee, copyright, Plus, technology, commercial stock, gumgum, license, IPTC, law, Royalty free, transaction, finance, keyword, prosumer, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

December 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

Part of the reason text journalism is failing is mostly due to the laziness of its reporters. It seems that if something was not presented to them via a press release or already published elsewhere, they will not write about it. There is almost no investigation left and everything is just reprint and Copy/Paste.

With this said and while you enjoy a probably cold day at home ( if your are in the Northern Hemisphere) lets look at  a few new things emerging at our horizon:

Our friends at Google seem to be more and more involved in image search. After putting online content from the Life magazine collection, currently being license by Getty Images, they have taken the first step to actually managing image content. Unlike the rest of the image search in Google, this collection seemed to have been indexed entirely on its IPTC content. Even more interesting, this content  does not appear on a Yahoo search. As we wrote about before, the future of search is to display content unavailable to other search engine, making it an even more useful and valuable. Google certainly has the cash to purchase such content ( Getty anyone ?).Could this Life Collection be an experiment ? A few toes in the water? But that is old news.What Google has recently released can be seen in its “advanced search” and come as numerous filters:

It is now possible to separate images from drawings and illustrations. It is also possible to search only within editorial usage, by just selecting the “news content” filter.  The drop menus also allow for even more accuracy as one allows to pick the file format, as the other can filter the b/w or color images. Finally with the “domain ” filter, you can actually do a search on a photo agency website using the Google search engine instead of their own.  Some  photo agency or photographer websites are so security obsessed that they will not let this happen, but that is their loss, not Google’s.

As it was stated before here many times, the future of the licensed images lies in being where the client is, not the opposite. Having your own website is only the beginning  and not an end in itself.

CNN. Unlike companies that have decided to cut  expenses, CNN is going all out to look for new revenue streams. After their wire service announcement, or in parallel I should say, they are beta testing their Image Source website :

Made entirely of videos , CNN is licensing their entire archive to the world. That is a huge blow to Getty who is lagging way behind in editorial video only offering lousy red carpet B roll. Cnn has also secured AFP video content, the same AFP that has a photo distribution deal with Getty images. Finally, CNN is also licensing the content they get from iReport, their user generated content.

As newspapers are dying and online sources of news are growing, CNN is betting on a huge yet untapped market. Furthermore it has little or no competition in this editorial video space. Will they license stills made from their video camera ? Time will tell.

Finally, stumbled upon a blog site today called the 37 th frame dot org. While it says that the intent is to promote photojournalism, its “About US” page not only offers no names but instead a big disclaimer saying that all images used on the site are covered by the fair use act.  It doesn’t prevent them from having big banner ads all over the site. I guess that promotion of photojournalism also means taking advantage of it these days. If whomever is behind this site would share its ad revenue with the photographers he displays on his/her site, photojournalism would feel much better.

Posted in magazine, IPTC, Cnn, technology, commercial stock, google, web 2.0, news, editorial, photojournalism, prosumer, getty | Print | No Comments »

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 »