The International Press Telecommunications Council and the Picture Licensing Universal System have released a second version of the Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe Creative Suite. The package of eight files is
available for free download.
Adobe CS5 has built-in file information panels that provide fields for communicating IPTC information and image rights metadata, based on the PLUS Coalition standards. The IPTC-PLUS toolkit provides comprehensive guidelines for the IPTC Core and IPTC Extension file-info panels.
For earlier versions—CS3 and CS4—the toolkit provides an Adobe Bridge plug-in to accomplish the same goal. The plug-in and accompanying user guide were developed by IPTC and PLUS jointly, with an aim of making these easy to use by non-expert metadata writers. The metadata panel includes IPTC Extension fields that enable the user to clearly identify all persons and objects in an image, make model and property releases available and provide details about the image’s creator, copyright owner and licensor.
The guidelines for using the PLUS fields explain how to express the usage rights of an image. The documents were authored by David Riecks, who has been among the stock industry’s technical leaders of metadata initiatives, including the Stock Artists Alliance Photo Metadata Project. Riecks had previously written the 2005 guide for the IPTC Core.
For those who have little experience with metadata, the IPTC-PLUS toolkit includes four example image files. These have a rich set of metadata to be used for reference.