Persuading Picture Agency to be consistent with Metadata fields used, and how useful information is delivered

[honorcb]

Is there a way the Guardian and BBC can lobby agencies in relation to additional metadata , and ways of identifying an agency "Picked image" that makes this information usable in the Grid for the end users , without favouring an agency,

[honorcb]

How do we make agencies consistent on how they identify their "Picked" images , identify pictures that have "Embargo" dates , Kill notice images, images that require updates to the metadata, such as football match images listing the wrong event or teams.

It is currently relevant because the IPTC is reviewing RightML to see if there could be a few standard messages that could accompany content that is both human and machine readable , giving a basic standard between all the agencies.

[honorcb]

Our News teams have a request, would it be possible to PA to give the Nation , where the picture was taken ?
They use Getty because they can search for England, or Scotland to filter images, but agencies appear not to do this.

They are looking for images such as those relating to the Weather in England, which the agencies group by Country , United Kingdom.

I know this is not simple, as the group "location metadata" fields have the cardinality of 0 ..1 so cannot have United Kingdom and England in the Country field

[paperboyo]

Interesting. I have looked into 2 images from both PA and Getty. None of them are using newest Location Shown (Grid doesn’t support it, but last time I checked nobody is providing it anyway). They both use legacy IPTC and XMP versions of Location data.

Relevant exiftool output below:

PA:

IPTC.Country-PrimaryLocationName = UK
XMP.photoshop:Country = UK

(no state info)

Grid displays:

Getty:

IPTC.Country-PrimaryLocationName = United Kingdom
IPTC.Country-PrimaryLocationCode = GBR
XMP.photoshop:Country = United Kingdom
XMP.Iptc4xmpCore:CountryCode = GBR
IPTC.Province-State = England
XMP.photoshop:State = England

Grid displays:

So Getty is using State/Province legacy field to express England. It’s unclear to me if that’s correct from the standards POV.

But it’s only Getty that seems to be using State for United Kingdom nations consistently. All other major agencies I checked (AP, AAP, EPA, Reuters and indeed PA) do it one time in a thousand.

Not sure how likely is it to convince all of them to do it consistently. Even more so, because it’s not clear it’s even correct use of State/Province field. Plus, it’s “legacy” for a reason. Looking at the newer Location structure, it’s also not clear what State/Province should contain. It’s clear Country should be United Kingdom, but that’s about it. Quick Googling and trawl of IPTC group doesn’t give any useful answers either… Convincing agencies to strictly stick to standards seems hard enough, asking them to follow conventions may be harder, I fear.

[honorcb]

https://iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata#location-structure
is I think most recent essay about this,

Getty use of State Province does not allow them to stay which "county" the picture was taken in, and I know for PA regional customers that more important than the Nation,