Category: Keywording / Metadata
News
Electric Lane launches keywording service
Image industry consultancy Electric Lane has announced a new service to help picture agencies get their images in front of buyers. Electric Lane works with keywording expert Liisa Kaakinen to create controlled vocabularies to suit the needs of image libraries, their customers and their distributors. Electric Lane provides its customers with access to presentations, studies and recent articles on the use of controlled vocabularies, including presentations by Imense and Pixolution from the seminar on visual image search at the CEPIC Conference, which was chaired by the Director of Electric Lane, Sarah Saunders.
News
Stock Artists Alliance’s free metadata seminars serves nearly 800 picture professionals
The Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) , a trade organization for stock photographers, announced last May that it was launching an educational speaking series called getMETAsmart made possible with an award from the Library of Congress and supported by industry partners. Since then SAA is touting that it has already held seven, free educational events over the past two months, with nearly 800 participants from around the country. The Stock Artists Alliance plans three more getMETAsmart events for this fall.
News
Kursiv releases KIM Keywording 1.5
Kursiv, a swiss stock photography agency that also offers keywording software called Kim Keywording, has announced that it has released a new version of its multilingual keywording software. KIM Keywording 1.5 offers many workflow improvements and introduces a simple method to prioritize keywords. The new version is a free upgrade for existing users. In a recent press release the company stated “KIM Keywording has been designed to take the pain out of keywording and to make the process both fast and reliable”.
News
Dreamstime releases “Stock Rank” an interactive stock photo review tool
Dreamstime, a Brentwood Tennessee based micro-payment stock photography business, has announced that it has introduced a new feature called “Stock Rank” that pairs two images on the screen and challenges the user to select the best photo—the photo most worthy of purchase or download—based on concept, subject, aesthetics, lighting, composition, etc. This feature was initially established as a quality assurance system utilized primarily by the agency’s editors as part of their training to review the commercial aspects of stock submissions. “We’re making the feature available to all members. It’s fun and will allow all users to learn to understand the difference between the images, degrees of quality and what actually sells,” said Serban Enache, CEO and co-founder of Dreamstime.com.
News
SAA launches PhotoMetadata.org and getMETAsmart tour
The Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) , a trade organization for stock photographers, has announced that it has launched a new website located at PhotoMetadata.org and an educational speaking series called getMETAsmart . These intitatives have been launched under an award from the Library of Congress and supported by industry partners, the SAA Photo Metadata Project is on a mission to promote industrywide use of standard photo metadata in every digital image file.
News
Imense launches semi-automatic keywording tool
Imense, a Cambridge (UK) company producing leading image recognition and retrieval software, has announced that it has launched a new product called Annotator, billed as a semi-automated keywording tool designed to dramatically reduce the time it takes for photographers to keyword their images. The tool uses special image recognition technology to detect and suggest keywords related to the number of people in the image, orientation, image type, presence of copy space, ethnic origin and age range, Etc. “With such dramatic acceleration in efficiency, blended with more commercially optimised keywording, Annotator is a step change in a traditionally slow and often ineffective process” says Tony Rowland, Director of Sales for imense.
News
KeyIndia Graphics partners with Pictory AG to offer outsourced imaging services in Germany
KeyIndia Graphics, an Indian company offering photo retouching, scanning, keywording and digital asset management solutions has announced a new partnership with Pictory AG in Mainz, Germany to offer out-sourced services in the German market. Pictory AG is a startup founded by Clemens Molinari, a well-known veteran in the German prepress and imaging business. Molinaristates “interest in
outsourcing services in the imaging business will grow enormously. We are very happy we found a partner renowned for quality and reliability because this is the key issue in this business.”
News
ACAP to adopt PLUS image licensing standards
ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), a new global non-proprietary machine-readable protocol that enables publishers to control how their online content is re-used, has announced that it has adopted the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) image licensing protocols. In a recent press release ACAP stated plans to use the PLUS License Data Format and PLUS Media Matrix standards to supplement the existing ACAP vocabulary for communicating license-related information in a machine-readable form to web crawlers and other automated devices that use web content. ACAP has previously concentrated on text-based web resources, and its adoption of PLUS semantics is part of a planned extension of ACAP to meet publisher requirements to communicate more precise terms for use of photographic and other media resources by web crawlers.
News
OnAsia releases keyword suggestion feature for Image Keyworder software
OnAsia, a Singapore based stock photography and assignment agency, has announced that it has released a new ‘suggest’ function as part of its Windows-based Image Keyworder software. The suggest feature now allows the community to participate in refining and growing Image Keyworder’s controlled vocabulary of more than 40,000 terms. The new version is offered as a free upgrade for existing users or costs approx US$ 79.99 for a new license allowing installation on two computers.
News
Photo News Round-Up
• Newscom adds a variety of still imagery and footage collections including Pacific Coast News and Rapport Press.
• Brooklyn Museum crowd-sourcing fine art photography with Open Call for its latest Photography Exhibition
• The Stock Artists Alliance launches the SAA Metadata Project, a comprehensive survey of metadata practices by photographers and stock image distributors.
News
Kursiv launches KIM Keywording software
Kursiv, a swiss stock photography agency, has announced that it is now offering software to aid photo agencies and photographers who are struggling to keyword their images. The new software called "KIM Keywording" will be released early summer 2008.
News
Capture integrates PLUS licensing standards into its asset management system
Capture a leading developer of image and digital asset management systems from the UK has announced that it has integrated the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) standards into its web-based asset management system Capture Office Online (COO). According to a press release issued by the company “This means that the PLUS media matrix can be used in COO to specify standardized usage categories – and then generate prices easily (and the unique PLUS price code) by using COO’s price factoring facility”.
News
CEPIC to host 2nd annual meta data conference in Malta
At last year’s CEPIC Conference in Florence, CEPIC added a special one-day conference dedicated specifically to the topic of metadata – descriptive and identifying text information that accompanies digital photographs—hosted in partnership with the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and the European news and media trade organization, IFRA. Building on the success of last year’s metadata meeting, the thee organizations will hold a second meta-data conference in Malta on June 5, 2008, called “Metadata for Better Business.”
News
New Zealand’s More Images is launching Keedup as separate keywording business
Three years ago More Images, a New Zealand based stock photo agency, launched a keywording service called Keedup to serve the needs of photographers and photo agencies from around the world. Now the company is launching Keedup Ltd as a separate privately-owned company in order to better promote growth of the new business. “With our relatively low wages, and high education standards we are delivering keywording at the standard of US and UK companies, but at a greatly reduced price” states the company’s founder Kevin Townsend.
News
Keywording.com develops method for converting captions into keywords
Keywording.com, a Portland Oregon based firm that specializes in keywording images for stock agencies and independent artists, has announced that it has developed a method to efficiently convert photograph captions into relevant keywords. The process was developed by the company’s managing Director Kirsti O’Sullivan, in response to a growing demand get images to market faster and at less cost. “Most photographs will have a caption. We can take that caption and jump-start you towards great keywords at a very reasonable price,” states O’Sullivan.
News
Library of Congress taps into Flickr community to tag vintage images
The library of Congress is participating in the launch of a Flickr initiative dubbed "The Commons" where it has posted 3,115 vintage images Including shots of early 20th century baseball players to 1940s-era images of horse-drawn carts and factory workers. The images have been posted in an effort to solicit help from the Flickr community in tagging the works in order to bring new context to the collection.
News
Dreamstime offers useful new keyword tool for contributors
The micro-stock company, Dreamstime, has created a new resource to help photographers understand better how their images are found by those who go purchase them. The company calls the tool, which is unique to Dreamstime and deceptively simple, “words that work.” It allows the contributor to see the specific keywords used by a purchaser to find the image they went on to buy. While often times the keyword is obvious, in many cases the words offer a different perspective on an image that might not have occurred to the contributor, which can provide helpful guidance to shooting and keywording on future productions.
News
New Zealand firm Keedup to provide outsourced research services to photo libraries
Keedup, an Auckland, New Zealand keywording company, has decided to add another service to its offerings to stock photo libraries: picture research. The company believes many photo libraries miss out on sales because their staff can't keep up with research requests during regular business hours or simply don't get to off-hours requests soon enough to meet clients' deadlines. According Kevin Townsend, managing director at Keedup, "This is a particularly big problem for small to medium size libraries and photo agencies who are based in one country. When the day comes to an end there is often no one around to deal with customers' research requests."
News
News Brief: JaincoTech opens London scanning facility to serve European and UK clients.
In partnership with Elizabeth Whiting Associates (EWA,) digital image services provider JaincoTech has opened a scanning facility in the UK. The company now has three scanning operations worldwide, in London, Mumbai, India and Solon, Ohio.
News
Internet Archive selected to digitize NASA space imagery
Internet Archive of San Francisco has announced a partnership to scan, archive and manage the NASA's collection of photographs, film and video. Currently, NASA has more than 20 major imagery collections online. For the first time all of the NASA collections will be available through a single archive of NASA imagery. NASA appears to have selected Internet Archive, as a partner largely due to the fact that it is a nonprofit organization. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives at no cost to the agency.
