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 .

Yesterday I attended the Photo Metadata Conference in Florence. A full day on the topic of how to mark and find images in digital image archives. This conference was a success. The conference room were crowded and those who arrived late (still meaning before start) had to sit on the floor. A quick count in the morning resulted in more than 120 participants. The quality of speakers and discussions was very impressive. Many great suggestions on how to make image mark-up and searching came up during this day. The camera manufactures Canon, Nikon and Hasselblad attended and were very open to suggestions. The achievement of getting people from Nikon and Canon to travel all the way from Japan specifically for this event is worth a warm applaud to the organizers.

To summarize the day in a few bullets:

• To days enormous flood of images requires accurate mark-up
• Keyword spamming are a sever problem for those trying to find a specific image. Many photographers and image editors writes as many keywords they can possible come up with, in many cases even totally wrong ones just to give the image more search hits.
• Many images are missing unique image identification and owner information
• It must be easier and more efficient to tag and mark images
• It is important that no metadata are lost in workflows and distribution systems. Interoperability is a serious issue.
• The demands are very different for press, stock and heritage images
• The is a huge demand for proper training of photographers and image editors

This article will soon be followed by summaries of each speech as separate posts.

I am a member of Cepics technical committee that recently released a white paper on how to improve the current IPTC-standard. Well to be honest, many of the other in this group did the major work. I have more been a reviewer. But I will soon start a more active part with this work – one of my roles in this group will be to formulate a suggestion to the camera manufactures on what IPTC-fields that are the most important to set already in the camera. But more on that later…

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