IPTC-PLUS Toolkit Boosts Easy use of Photo Metadata With Adobe Products

LONDON, July 15, 2010 - The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and PLUS
Coalition (PLUS) have today boosted the easy and successful use of photo
metadata by the release of a toolkit to be used with Adobe Systems Inc.'s CS3
to CS5 products. The included tools help photographers, image libraries and
photo agencies to store in the images detailed descriptions of their content
and data relevant for managing image copyrights. Metadata are considered as
being critical to the photo business as they are used for searching pictures
and to indicate the rights and terms of their use. The tools are as all IPTC
and PLUS applications free of charge and can be downloaded from the IPTC
website at www.iptc.org and from the PLUS site at
www.usePLUS.org.

The IPTC-PLUS Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS includes easy to use
IPTC-PLUS Metadata panels for Adobe Bridge CS3 and CS4 plus comprehensive
user guidelines for these panels and the file-info panels already built into
all CS5 products. The panels for Bridge include the granular metadata fields
of the IPTC Photo Metadata and also a set of fields for the communication of
image rights metadata, based on industry standard developed by the PLUS
Coalition. Creating these panels was a joint effort of both organisations.

"Metadata help photo businesses to earn more money as their pictures can
be found easier by search systems. This IPTC-PLUS Photo Metadata Toolkit is a
great support for all who have to add the metadata to the images - and it
saves money by making writing metadata easier", said Stephane Guerillot,
Chairman of the IPTC.

"IPTC was instrumental in the development of the PLUS Standards, and our
active collaboration continues today with the release of the IPTC-PLUS
Metadata Panels, allowing image creators, distributors and users to benefit
from the full scope of image metadata, all from within a single tool," said
Jeff Sedlik, President and CEO of the PLUS Coalition.

The user guide documents aim at non-expert metadata writers. They cover
the basic IPTC Core fields which keep the most essential information about an
image and also the IPTC Extension fields which add fields to clearly identify
all persons, organisations, locations and artwork object in the image,
further they make model and property releases available and provide details
about the creator, the copyright owner and the licensor of the image. The
guidelines for using the PLUS fields explain how to express the usage rights
of an image in many variations, including constraints. The user guide
documents were authored by David Riecks who has already written the first
guide for the IPTC Core in 2005. Further the toolkit will include sample
images with all the described metadata already added.

About the IPTC:

The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world's major news
agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and
maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by
virtually every major news organisation in the world. Information on all IPTC
standards such as the Photo Metadata standards, the family of G2-Standards -
NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2 -, NewsML 1, NITF, IIM and the
NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to
join is available at www.iptc.org

About PLUS:

The PLUS Coalition is an international non-profit standards body on a
mission to simplify and facilitate the communication and management of image
rights. PLUS participants from more than thirty countries span all industries
engaged in creating, distributing, using and preserving images. Information
on the PLUS standards, including the Picture Licensing Glossary, Media
Matrix, License Data Format and others is available at www.useplus.org

web: www.iptc.org

    Michael Steidl
    IPTC Managing Director
    phone: +44(0)20-3178-4922
    fax: +44(0)20-7664-7878
    email: office@iptc.org

Michael Steidl, IPTC Managing Director, phone: +44(0)20-3178-4922, fax: +44(0)20-7664-7878, email: office at iptc.org