Have you advanced the year in your copyright notice? As I write this, the new year is a couple of weeks old. That’s about when most photographers start to feel a slight gnawing feeling that maybe there might be something they’ve forgotten.
So, go increment your copyright year while it’s still early enough to pretend that you did it in time for your first assignment of the new year.
Users of Photo Mechanic don’t have to go through this copyright year nonsense. In Photo Mechanic, you can just put a variable in the copyright field in your template. The variable will fill in the copyright year when you apply your template. And you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Ever. Again.
Google has begun actively surfacing copyright metadata on Google Images. Now that the Copyright field itself is working, users can see all three of the IPTC fields Google promised a few weeks ago. What does this mean for website operators?
It means that, if you haven't already, you should make sure your site respects metadata on images.
If you haven’t already, you should, ah… encourage your content contributors to put their names on their work.
On September 27, Google announced that it would include limited support for IPTC metadata in Google Images. Next to the gratuitous “Images may be subject to copyright” disclaimer, users may now find a link for “Image Credits” if that metadata exists in the photo. They can now see for sure who owns the picture. That is, if, the relevant metadata exists in the image file.
Google will now display to users, at least those who look, the contents of three copyright-related metadata fields - the IPTC Creator, Creditline, and Copyright fields. (The first two are operational now, the latter will be “in coming weeks.”)
This is a huge step forward for photographers. But “if” the metadata exists means we have to put it there.
Google Images will include copyright-related IPTC metadata
Google announced today that Google Image Search will support some IPTC metadata. In a blog post dated today, September 27, 2018, Google Images product manager Ashutosh Agarwal says that “Starting today, we’ve added Creator and Credit metadata whenever present to images on Google Images. … Over the coming weeks, we will also add Copyright Notice metadata.”
Google will read from the IPTC Creator, Creditline, and Copyright fields to expose the metadata information.
In the IPTC’s own press release, photo metadata guru Michael Steidl says, “Embedded IPTC photo metadata has an essential role for photos posted on a website. These fields easily show people searching for images who its creator and copyright owner is. We encourage all parties who post images on the web to fill in these IPTC fields.”
Damn right!
This is a huge win, folks. The IPTC, CEPIC (the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies, which is an IPTC member and collaborated in the effort) and Google have made a giant stride. The motto of this blog says that “metadata empowers honest people”, and that’s just what happened today. Google has used it’s enormous weight to push forward the role of metadata, enhance copyright protections, and by extension, promote honesty itself.
What’s new
Users, upon finding an image in a Google Image search will see a link for “Image Credits” on a photo’s search results page. Clicking through will reveal the metadata, first from the Creator and Creditline fields, and soon from the Copyright field as well. A further Google search should produce contact information for the copyright holder, from whom a license to use the image legally could be obtained.
What you need to know: The IPTC has published a Quick Guide for metadata for Google Images here.
Full faith and force
The key takeaway is that the “force of Google” has been imposed. Users with professional level skills know that copyright management information metadata can be read from an image on Google Images by simply downloading the image and looking at its metadata. Such users also understand that scarcely any images include any metadata, either because their creators didn’t bother to put it there, or because some website stripped it away.
And no one could help but appreciate the irony in Google’s “Images may be subject to copyright” disclaimer.
That changes today
As of now, photographers are on notice that if they wish their rights to be taken seriously, they need to sign their work in the metadata.
Website operators who want to please Google – which is to say all of us – will need to check to make sure their websites preserve embedded metadata. (See this post, and this one for information on making your site metadata-friendly.)
Designers and ordinary users will be able to see at a glance who owns a photo, assuming that person has labeled their work. (And there won’t be any excuse for not looking.)
Internet hosting providers now have more incentive to provide metadata-friendly default settings for their customers.
Quick copyright refresher
The creator of a work owns the copyright to the work, unless the creator is an employee whose job is the creation of copyrighted content, or the creator has explicitly transferred the copyright to another party. Thus, it follows that a copyright owner will be identified in the Creator or Creditline metadata fields. Later, when Google exposes the Copyright field, not only will it identify the copyright holder directly, but often will contain contact information, such as a telephone number or web address.)
SEO implications?
Google hasn’t said that it will consider IPTC metadata, and a website’s treatment of it, in calculating page rank. Let’s just say it wouldn’t surprise me. I’d be shocked if they don’t, frankly. If not now, soon. Google’s oft-stated mission is to surface the best quality, most relevant, content. The concept of “authority” has long been a critical means to that end. Respect for copyright and specificity in description of content certainly seem like markers of “authority” to me.
A mere hint that Google might value something usually causes a stampede of activity as SEO consultants spread the word to their clients, who, in this case, will surely pass on requests (or requirements) for metadata to their content providers.
It doesn’t hurt that sensible metadata is basically free Google “juice”. A reasonably full set of metadata adds only a millisecond or so to page load time. And setting a web server to be metadata-friendly doesn’t cost a darn thing.
Will Google look further into embedded metadata in the future? Will they, for example, compare the contents of a photo’s own caption with the caption on the web page and use the results to predict the relevance and freshness of the content? I sure would, in their place. As a human photo curator, that’s a strategy that I do use. Google is famously tight-lipped about their ranking algorithms. They’re also logical and smart. If Google’s support for embedded metadata makes embedded metadata more commonly available as a potential ranking factor, will they go ahead and use it? I’ll bet they will.
Technical stuff
Google will be reading metadata from the XMP and IIM data blocks, in that order. If XMP is present, it’s read. If not, the IIM will be read. That’s a sensible reading order, and in fact the one I usually recommend. No mention has been made by either Google or the IPTC of reading creator or copyright data from the Exif. That’s fine by me. I never thought that descriptive metadata belonged in the Exif block anyway.
Regular readers will know of the challenges and ambiguities of the Creditline field, and that I’m not too comfortable with using it in the way that is suggested by this development. Watch this space for new guidance as my views on this field are forced to evolve. (A summary of IPTC fields can be found here.)
“Starting today” tends to be an elastic concept for Google. As I write this post in the afternoon of September 27th, I haven’t yet been able to find a working example of the new functionality anywhere on Google Images. I have included the animated GIF Google used to illustrate its own post, but I have yet to see “Image Credits” in the flesh, not even on the image Google used in their own illustration. It may be a while before a Google Images search returns metadata for your images.
In their press release, the IPTC invites website owners and software developers to contact them for help implementing metadata support in products.
This blog is part of a pro bono effort in support of the benefits of good metadata. If you are a developer, a webmaster, or a content producer and you want help with metadata, you may reach out to me, as well. In most cases (and within reasonable limits) I provide help free of charge.
The Creative Commons licenses require - as long as it is “reasonable” - provision of a link back to the original work. For photographers, that means a link to an “original” file. In this post, we look at what kind of file to host and how to host it.
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has named Brendan Quinn as its new managing director.
Quinn joins the IPTC with two decades of experience in managing technology for media companies. In June 2018, he will succeed Michael Steidl, who will retire this summer after 15 years with the organisation. IPTC made the announcement today at their Spring Meeting in Athens.
A newly-released application can add metadata viewing functionality to websites and web apps, or even on a local computer. IPTC Managing Director Michael Steidl wrote the program, Get IPTC PMD. The application, as configured for a test system, here, can display whether or not metadata is in sync between the three data blocks where IPTC data can live in your files.
A reader sent in a super-clever method, using Photo Mechanic's Find and Replace dialog and its ability to use Grep and regular expressions to get rid of the mess that Lightroom can make in our keywords. This post is a sidebar to my post on using Photo Mechanic's Structured Keywords feature. (Keywording in Photo Mechanic Part 2)
Photo Mechanic is a powerful keywording tool; we’ll learn how in two HOW-Tos
Now that we have a plan in place for our keywording strategy (see this post), we can dive in and actually keyword some pictures. This post is the first of two HOW-TOs on keywording in Photo Mechanic. (I’ll look at keywording in other software in future posts.) There are nearly a dozen ways to apply keywords in Photo Mechanic. In this post, we’ll look at the “flat” methods. In Part 2, we’ll tackle hierarchical, or, in Photo Mechanic terms, “structured” keywording.
Let’s keyword
With a photo selected in Photo Mechanic, simply call the IPTC Editor dialog with the “i” button or the “I” key on your keyboard.
Go to the Keywords field and type in a keyword, then a comma, a space, and another keyword. And so forth. EXCEPT DON’T DO THAT! Remember that we should avoid – if at all possible – typing keywords. We need keywords to be consistent – no typos, no variations, no misspellings. We want to choose keywords.
So, go to the triangle to the right of the keywords field and click. With some luck, you’ll see a flyout with keywords listed, and you can choose one, open the flyout again, choose another, and so on. Your chosen keywords will appear in the Keywords field, neatly separated with commas.
But we’ve probably gotten ahead of ourselves. How do your keywords find their way into that flyout? Read on.
From the flyout, choose “Edit Keywords”. That will open the Edit Keywords dialog. (Photo Mechanic’s legend on the dialog says “IPTC Keywords”, but we’re going to call it “Edit Keywords” because that’s what it does and that’s how we called it.)
The Edit Keywords dialog has two panes. The pane on the right is called the “Master Keywords List”. The keywords in this list are the keywords that appear in the flyout in the IPTC editor. Put keywords in this list, OK the dialog and those keywords will be your flyout keywords.
Don’t read too much into “Master Keywords List”. This isn’t your for-real master list of keywords, your controlled vocabulary that you’ve been working on since your visit to my last post. This list of keywords can’t be much longer than a dozen or two items. This is a topical keyword list. You’ll want to have separate “Master Keywords Lists” for different subjects or situations, like portraits or landscapes, or for certain clients, or even for specific assignments.
That brings us to…..Snapshots
Look below the Master Keywords List. You’ll see editing functions. Their use is obvious. They work the same way in all the Photo Mechanic dialogs that work with lists.
Just below that, you’ll find two – Two! – Snapshot buttons. (Lightning bolt icons) As far as I know, this is the only dialog in Photo Mechanic that has two Snapshot buttons. The one on the right saves and calls Snapshots for the Master Keywords List. So, if you save subsets of your keyword vocabulary as Snapshots here, you can simply switch snapshots to bring up the correct set of keywords for your flyout(s).
At this point, you may be feeling a little uncomfortable about all your work that you’ll be saving as Snapshots. You don’t need to worry.
Option-click (Alt-click on Windows) on any snapshot. (I sometimes have to do this twice. Just a glitch, maybe.) Photo Mechanic will open a file manager window at the folder for Snapshots for whatever dialog you may be using. You’ll see that the Snapshots are stored on disk as .SNAP files. You can copy, backup, migrate or share the .SNAP files to your heart’s content.
You can also simply navigate to the folder in your operating system’s file manager. If a Snapshot flyout gets crowded, you can temporarily move Snapshots and store them elsewhere on your hard drive. (Snapshots can be exported and imported through the settings Import/Export function in Photo Mechanic’s preferences, too.)
And on the left
Take a look at the pane on the left of the dialog, the “Current Keywords List”. This pane will populate with the keywords on the selected image. You can select keywords in the right pane and copy them over to the left pane. Then, when you OK the dialog, those keywords will be applied to the picture you’re working on. In this way, you can apply a bunch of keywords, even from different Snapshots, to a picture, in a heartbeat.
The Snapshot button on the left controls Snapshots for the Current Keywords List. With it, you can make Snapshots of complicated sets of keywords to apply to specific pictures.
Now let’s put this all together
Knowing what we now know, we can work our way back to the beginning to make our flyout list work the way we want it to. But we should go a few steps further to ensure we abide by our controlled vocabulary.
There are Import and Export buttons in the Edit Keywords dialog. These will export your Master Keywords List to a text file, and import a text file into the Master Keywords List (replacing whatever is in it).
If you export and look at the file, you’ll see that it’s just a flat text file with a list of keywords, each on its own line. You can easily make up such a list and import it to the Master Keywords List and, in turn, make that into a Snapshot.
If you import a large-ish list, you can then select some keywords from it in the right pane, copy them to the left pane in the dialog (which you may have to clear for the occasion), then clear the right pane and copy the keywords back. Make a Snapshot. You’ve just made a ready-to-use keywords set for your flyout out. It’s a subset of the list you started with. That list you started with would be…. your controlled vocabulary! So, the flyout list you just made conforms to your controlled vocabulary!
Format your list
It’s quite likely that your controlled vocabulary will be in the form of a hierarchical keyword list. Such a list, if it’s formatted for Photo Mechanic, will be formatted with tabs and the occasional bracket. It’s logical that you would have to use a text editor to edit (a copy of) the list to match the simple format of the Edit Keywords dialog. But wait! You can automate some of the text-editing work and Photo Mechanic will automate most of the rest.
Open your hierarchical list in a text editor. Don’t worry about the tabs. Photo Mechanic will take care of those. You’ll see some keywords in curly brackets. Those are synonyms in the hierarchical list. You can use the Find and Replace function in your text editor to remove the brakets. First, zap the left curly bracket. The do the right one. Poof! That’s done.
I would go ahead and save the file and import it into the dialog at this point. Now, in your Master Keywords List pane, you might see some items in regular brackets. Those are categories, or labels. They show in the Structured Keywords dialog, but they aren’t applied to images. You might want to turn them into keywords, or you might want to delete them. Either way, it’s easy to do using the edit function in the Master Keywords pane.
You might see duplicate items in your list. If so, Multi-select the entire list and copy it over to the left pane. Zap! The dupes are gone. Clear the right-hand pane, multi-select everything in the left pane and copy back to the right. Now you have a perfectly clean list, ready to work with.
(I demonstrate all this in the video version of this post. It might be easier to follow watching, instead of reading.)
Apply with the Stationery Pad
Now, open your Stationery Pad. (CMD+I/CTL+I, or use Image > Stationery Pad from the main menu) In the keywords field, you’ll see that you have the same tools that you have in the IPTC editor. That means you can apply anything you can do with the flyout or Edit Keywords to a Stationery template.
Adding keywords to a template and then applying the template is pretty straightforward. But what if you want to work with keywords on a batch of pictures after you’re done with your other metadata work?
Click “Clear” to clear your Stationery pad. Now tick the tickbox next to the keywords field. That will turn the Keywords field “on” and every other field “off” Now you can apply keywords to selected pictures without affecting any other fields.
Notice the little plus sign by the keywords field. There’s a tickbox next to it. This little gizmo turns append on and off for the keywords field. Usually, when you work with keywords, you’ll want to append. You’ll want to be able to add keywords to any that already exist in the Keywords field. Generally, you want to make sure the append tickbox is ticked.
But if you want a do-over, you can clear the keywords field on images by simply leaving it blank in the Stationery pad, and overwriting whatever might be in the field on the pictures. In which case, unticking the append tickbox will do the trick.
And yet another powerful method
What if you just want to apply some keywords to a bunch of selected images directly, without fussing with the Stationery pad at all?
CMD+K/CTL+K will open something called the Keywords Panel. (You can also find this panel in the Image menu.) The Keywords Panel looks sort of like the Edit Keywords dialog, except it is arranged vertically instead of horizontally. The top of the panel is a pane that looks like the Master Keywords List pane in the Edit Keywords dialog. It will, in fact, display the selected Master Keywords List. There is the same editing functionality. And a Snapshot button. This Snapshot button accesses the same set of Snapshots that the one in Edit Keywords does.
So, you just choose the subset of your controlled vocabulary that you want and you’re good to go in this panel.
Multi-select keywords from the top pane and they will appear in the “Applying:” field at the bottom. “Apply to selected photos” does just that. (You can also type directly in the “Applying:” field. But don’t 🙂 )
There is also a setting pulldown that allows you to choose between append and overwrite behavior for this panel.
These are the “flat” methods for applying keywords in Photo Mechanic. I doubt any given user will use all of them, and I suspect that most readers of this blog will be more interested in the fancier and more powerful Structured Keywords functionality. But most of us will pick and choose one or two of these methods to use when the situation seems right.
Next time, we’ll fire up the Structured Keywords panel, load it with our controlled vocabulary, and have at it.
A few posts along, we’ll explore keywording in Adobe Lightroom. In the meantime, please reach out in the comments.
Which IPTC metadata fields do you need to fill out for each of your pictures? Which ones do you take care of with your template? Do you need to add metadata to all your photos, or just a subset? Enquiring minds want to know.