Major Publishers Adopt PLUS Standards

A press release from the PLUS Coalition today announced:

"Representatives of McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson each announced that they will adopt the Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS) Picture Licensing Glossary definitions in their contracts, and that they encourage image suppliers to begin embedding PLUS license metadata in all images within one year."

The publishers voiced their support at the "PLUS Takes Root in the Publishing Industry" event hosted by the Picture Archive Council of America, during their recent International Conference in New York City.


Some of you may be aware of the work of PLUS, but for those of you that aren't aware; here is the elevator speech: The PLUS coalition is an international non-profit organization dedicated to simplifying and facilitating the communication and management of image rights. It includes all of the groups involved in the picture licensing industry (publishers, picture archives, photographers, illustrators, designers, advertising agencies, museums, libraries, artist representatives, educational institutions, manufacturers and their associations ) which have jointly developed a standard for describing (PLUS glossary and Media Matrix), recording (PLUS License Definition Format), embedding (PLUS License Embedder), and reading (PLUS License Reader) licensing information for images.

Today's announcement shows that the movement is finally coming to fruition, as the biggest publishing companies are adopting the PLUS standards, and recommending image makers to start using these standards as part of their workflow.

Details including the full press release can be found on the PLUS website.

When you visit the site, take some time to learn about the PLUS Embedder, an application that can be used in tandem with the PLUS website to generate licenses and define licensing terms that can be added to each image provided to clients and third parties as embedded metadata.

The PLUS Coalition includes participants in thirty countries, and receives significant support from Leadership Circle members Adobe, Adbase, Adobe, Pentagram, Jupiterimages, Digimarc, Belay Development, Getty Images, IDEAlliance, ImageSpan, Photo District News, IPTC, NAPP, PACA, StockPhotoFinder, Swan Turton, WongDoody and Capture.

iView Multimedia Web Site End Of Life

Douglas Norton, SSDE for Expression Media with Microsoft Corporation passed along the following to the members of the Controlled Vocabulary Forum yesterday.

It is now over 2 years since iView Multimedia Ltd. was acquired by Microsoft, and in that period we have been able to keep the iView web site available for those that needed the resources it contained.

Very shortly (in a week or so), that site will be removed from service. The future plans for its content are being discussed, but you should treat this email as a warning that the information may cease to be available.

If there is any information that you frequently access on that site, you should take whatever steps you need to secure your continued access to that information. You should act now.

In particular, you may wish to make backup copies of the iView MediaPro installers should your current copy become unserviceable. Additionally, information in the online guides and the forum may be of particular interest and you should ensure that you have a copy or printout.

Useful links:
iView Multimedia website
Expression Media website
Expression Media forum

Regards,

Douglas

Jeffrey Friedl releases Geotagging plug-in for Lightroom

Jeffrey Friedl, yes, the same Jeffrey Friedl that put out the Online
Exif Metadata reader, has now released a
Geotagging plug-in that works directly within Lightroom.

His plug-in reads a GPS unit's track log, then extrapolates the
location for each specific digital image based on the time it was
taken. Although that's the same basic mechanism many other geotagging
programs employ, Friedl's plug-in allows you to move move the process within Lightroom, minimizing the steps it takes to geotag your images.

Read his full blog entry on the Lightroom Geotagging Plug-in for a link to the download.

Q&A: Converting Keyword Catalogs between Photo Mechanic and Lightroom

Q: I have a custom controlled vocabulary set that I use for keywording in Photo Mechanic. Is there any easy way to use it in Lightroom?

A: Those are two of the easier formats to share as both understand and can use both synonyms and excluded category headers.

Some differences between the two are addressed in the CVKC-FAQ page.

For members of the Controlled Vocabulary Forum there is a document in the Files section about editing a Photo Mechanic style Keyword Catalog using a plain-text editor. This explains a bit of the underpinings of the format if you want to amend your version in a text editor before importing into Lightroom.

Depending on whether you are on Windows or Mac, it may be possible to simply save out the file from Photo Mechanic and then import into Lightroom. The Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog Support pages for both applications have basic
directions on how to export / import a Keyword Catalogs such as the Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog.

The only issue might be that Lightroom is expecting a Unicode "UTF-8" file with Mac carriage returns, and Photo Mechanic may save out the file as Unicode "UTF-8" but with Unix Line Feeds.

If you need to handle those types of conversions, utilities such as TextWrangler, TextPad, or Jedit can be very useful.