Sport through the lens

IPTC is consortium of the major news agencies, news publishers and producers of news industry programs, established in 1965. They are responsible for developing and maintaining of standards, which improve news exchange. After 1970 their main concern is development of standards, which improve and speed exchange of news data.


Photo Mechanic

Among many other standards, they also developed and introduced IPTC Photo metadata standard. Standard known among press photographers as IPTC data, IPTC fields or IPTC header, which enables us to caption photos with appropriate information about photo itself. IPTC data are very similar to EXIF data, information most of people, who ever did anything in digital photography, know, but it is used for different sort of information. While EXIF data contains technical data about particular photo, IPTC data contains descriptive information about photo itself, including photographers description of photo, photographers name, date, location etc.. Another difference between EXIF and IPTC data is way how it’s generated. EXIF data are generated in camera at moment photo is taken, while IPTC data is generated by humans (photographer or photographer’s assistant) later on.

Photographers working on finish of Cycling World Championship road race

Now, after few technicalities, let’s move to biggest difference. While most of hobby photographers knew almost everything about EXIF, they hardly know anything about IPTC. IPTC data are in domain of pro shooters, even though it shouldn’t be like this. And that’s main reason for my today’s writing. You probably wonder why I’m telling this. IPTC data, especially because they have to be entered by human, are just extra work noone really wants, right? Yes, and personally I think, sorting photos and captioning properly is worse part of photography. But IPTC data enables archiving programs to make database out of photos. Properly captioned photos are much easier to find once few days/months/years come by, and you forgot what you were shooting on sunny August 12th 2005 afternoon.

So everything looks easy and cool now, right? Well… not exactly :) Archiving programs are not all mighty, and they can’t organize photos properly, if your captions, keywords and other info in IPTC data are not done correctly. Efficient system of keywords is not really easy to make, and especially, it’s not easy to follow in future, but it’s necessary to have consistent database. Another problem is, one keywords system doesn’t fit everyone, so on the end, everyone has to find their own way of keeping record of their shooting, unless you are working for agency, where all set of IPTC data is strictly defined.

Personally I enter IPTC data for every photo I shoot, and I do this my way. For photos I send further to agencies I work for, I change them their desired way, but for my system, I keep it my way. I like to think, I found optimal way for myself, so please don’t burst my bubble :)

Press center after race

For captioning I’m using Photo Mechanic, which is probably fastest tool for ingesting, renaming, captioning, selecting and sending. Of course it’s not all in one program, but it does huge amount of work for me. I will write some other time more about my workflow, when working on tight deadlines. But this time I will stick with IPTC. :)

Since IPTC Data are standard, it’s easy for programmers to make database programs using IPTC Data. You have whole sort of programs from Canto Cumulus costing few 1000eur, to single user version of Mediadex for less then 100eur. And probably you could find shareware or freeware programs doing similar job. I settled for proprietary database/archiving program based on PHP and MySql, running on Unix server connected on separate local network, which is not connected to Internet. It works fine for me, and with a bit of Unix/Perl/PHP knowledge, it’s fully customizable solution, which doesn’t need maintenance, and on top of that it’s completely automatic, so I don’t need to do more, then put photos in upload folder of archive computer, while program do the rest… all by itself. Not to mention it’s “free” for me :)

Network

So with this, or any previously mentioned commercial programs, photographer can find any photo from past, based just on keywords, captions or even date or location. And that’s reason why I still think, even hobby photographers should consider IPTC Data and photo database/archiving programs as must have. With nowadays technology and number of digital photos in their archives, they will soon be unable to find photos they took in past. And I still think, one of major points in hobby photography is to look back and see all those wonderful moments caught on film or camera’s sensor.

And for the end… good luck captioning photos :)