SAA's Metadata Blogs

Latest Blog Entries:

October 17, 2009
Metadata Working Group Releases Verification Test Files
The Metadata Working Group (MWG) offers a new set of tools and Test Files for download to help developers verify whether their applications meet The Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata. more

September 5, 2009
A Big Game Safari of a Different Sort
PDN's Daryl Lang details the steps he took to track down the origin of the photo of the big kitty on the cover of the new Apple OS X release... but neglects to check for metadata. more

July 27, 2009
Riecks named Pioneer of Digital Preservation
David Riecks, project leader for the Stock Artists Alliance Photo Metadata Project is the most recently named Library of Congress "Pioneer of Digital Preservation." more

May 21, 2009
The Secret Life of Photo Metadata
David Riecks presented a key paper on photographic metadata May 7 at at the Archiving 2009 conference in Crystal City, Va. more

Feb 26, 2009
MGW Updates "Guidelines For Handling Image Metadata" to Version 1.01
The Metadata Working Group recently updated their specifications guidance pdf ("Guidelines For Handling Image Metadata") to version 1.01. more

Feb 2, 2009
New Bridge Scripts Restore GPS Metadata in TIFFs
It was reported on the Controlled Vocabulary last fall, that there were issues with GPS data being lost when saving files in the TIFF format using any version of Photoshop. Fortunately, this issue is only with the TIFF file format, and does not affect files being saved in the PSD or JPEG formats (saving TIFF files from Lightroom does not suffer from this same issue. more

Sept 24, 2008
Metadata Working Group releases Guidelines for Interoperability and Preservation of Metadata
A group going by the name of the "Metadata Working Group" made a major announcement at Photokina today and released a document that is designed to help developers by providing best practices on how to create, read and modify a set of core metadata values within digital images that use Exif, IPTC-IIM and XMP. more

Jul 28, 2008
Revised IPTC Core & Extensions Released
The IPTC has approved a new specification of their Photo Metadata Standard. This includes the the slightly updated IPTC Core 1.1 Schema, and the the brand new IPTC Extension 1.0 Schema which complements and extends the set of IPTC Core metadata properties. more

May 19, 2008
Free PHP Scripts Preserve Metadata for Server-Side Image Resizing Processes that Use GD
Laura Cotterman has discovered that resizing images on your website using the popular server-side application GD can inadvertently remove metadata from your image files. As there are many widely distributed PHP scripts for image galleries which resize (or watermark) images with GD, this would create a lot of potential "Orphan Works" and Cotterman decided to do something. more

May 5, 2008
Orphan Works is Back
On April 24, new draft versions of the Orphan Works Act of 2008 were introduced by both Houses of the U.S. Congress. The Stock Artists Alliance has published extensive commentary about Orphan Works, specifically noting the particular problems related to metadata and online distribution of images. more

Apr 29, 2008
IPTC Releases Draft Specification for IPTC Core "Extended"
The draft specification "IPTC Photo Metadata 2008" is now publicly available for review. There have been some minor modifications to version 1.1 of the IPTC Core (released in 2005), however the new IPTC Core "Extended" adds a significant number of new properties which complement and extend the current IPTC Core. more

Apr 30, 2008
Free Metadata Viewer Add-on for Firefox Users
Another handy tool to easily read embedded image metadata is a free Add-on for Firefox users called "Exif Viewer 1.40" that was developed by Alan Raskin. more

Jan 17, 2008
Read Exif, IPTC, XMP & More from your Browser
Not everyone has access to tools that allow them to easily read embedded image metadata, or to discern what type of metadata is hidden within an image file. However, thanks to Jeffrey Friedl, and his online EXIF metadata reader, you can now peek inside image files and check your EXIF, IPTC, XMP, etc. from within any web browser. more

Aug 14, 2007
SAA Receives Award from Library of Congress to Promote Photo Metadata Use and Preservation
The U.S. Library of Congress has awarded the Stock Artists Alliance one of eight partnerships for preserving digital media. The partnerships are part of the $2.15 million Preserving Creative America initiative of the Library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). more

Jun 19, 2007
Working Towards a Seamless Photo Workflow
The IPTC and IFRA held their First International Photo Metadata conference, titled "Working towards a seamless photo workflow on June 7, 2007 in Florence, Italy. The issues discussed in the IPTC Photo Metadata working group White Paper (mentioned below) figured prominently at this event, which attracted over 120 attendees, and was held prior to last week's CEPIC Congress. more

Jun 15, 2007
IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group White Paper Released
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) released the Photo Metadata White Paper in conjunction with the Global Photo Metadata Conference held in Florence, Italy on June 7, 2007. The paper focuses on improvements needed to broaden the scope of IPTC style photo metadata so that it is more useful to those in the stock photography and image archive sectors of the professional photography market. more

Jan 26, 2007
IPTC / IFRA Organize Global Metadata Conference
A first ever Global Photo Metadata Conference is being organised by IPTC (1) and IFRA (2), and will be hosted by CEPIC (3) in Florence, Italy on Thursday, June 7, 2007. This is the first time an international conference has been focused exclusively on photo metadata, and should bring together all interested parties in the photo metadata field, from the camera manufacturer to the photographer. more

Nov 13, 2006
IPTC Software Survey Release
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has just published the results of their survey of various imaging software that support the two IPTC photo metadata standards—Information Interchange Module [IIM] and "IPTC Core." more

Oct 27, 2006
IPTC Surveys Photo Metadata Developers
We applaud the International Press Telecommunications Council for launching their "IPTC Photo Metadata Software Implementation Survey." The IPTC has been at the forefront of photo metadata standards for more than a decade, starting when the IPTC's Information Interchange Model (IIM) standard was adopted by Adobe and others to provide metadata fields in digital image files starting in the early 1990's. more

Jul 26, 2006
Metadata Growing Up?
The article, "Metadata Growing Up" on the Stock Asylum website discusses the introduction by the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) of a Custom Metadata Panel for Photoshop that can be used by image distributors to to keep, manipulate and provide information that does not properly fit in currently available metadata fields. more

Jul 22, 2006
Well Done, iView
We congratulate iView Multimedia for reconsidering their decision to drop support for legacy IPTC metadata. When iView released version 3.1 of iView Media Pro, their application only stored metadata using the XMP/IPTC Core schema, and did not also store the metadata in the older, legacy IPTC (Image Resource Block) format. more