Over a normal weekend the imagedesk at Stern receives 25 000 images. Yesterday (Wednesday) they received 15 000 images from 12 different image suppliers. This day was a bit above normal due to the G8 summit. A search on “G8” results in 8691 images. If you limit to the last three days you get 4355 hits. If we narrow the search with the keyword “demonstration” you get 796 images. Only 0.03 percent of all incoming images are published.

Andreas spoke about the problem with incorrect information entered by photographers and image editors to give more search hits to their images. They believe that this increases their sales chance. But this is very frustrating for the image buyers trying to find an image of an specific topic. Very few image editors have proper education, they are self educated or has learnt their work through collegues.

Over half of all images in a normal picture archive show people. A search for Angela Märkel gives over 11 000 images at Getty. Since we ask photographers to enter journalistic text we also get hits for images of demonstrations against her politics.

LESS IS MORE
Have you ever viewed page 81 of a google search of “photo archive”? A search that term results in 258.000.000 entries. To check all those entries, then this search will take you 44,791 days (spending 15 seconds per entry), or just under 122 years – but that doesn’t include any coffee breaks!

It is more important to get better quality of image metadata content than better database software.

Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .

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