Friday, October 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. In 2005 the IPTC released the "IPTC Core" standard for metadata based on Adobe's technical XMP framework.

In order to gauge the adoption of this new schema and find out if there are any issues with how the two standards are cooperating they have launched this survey, which closes November 3, 2006. We encourage all metadata aficionados to contact their preferred image database or metadata editors and ask for their cooperation with this survey.

When the results of this survey are made public in the near future, all users of photo metadata will have a great resource to help them in determining which software applications they wish to consider for their own use.