I know this is supposed to be my personal blog, but the support team are working so hard on the admin back end to fotoLibra Version 4.0 that I feel diffident about hurrying them up to provide the fotoLibra Pro Blog when it’s just as easy to post stuff here. It will come soon, I am sure, but meanwhile here’s some good indigestible material to demonstrate that getting your pictures seen and sold isn’t simply about laying out huge bucks for a massive great lens and then pressing the button.

I’m going to a conference tomorrow about Metadata Image Library Exploitation. The speakers include Monika Hagedorn-Saupe and Axel Ermert discussing Current Activities for Networking Museum Information in Germany and the Development of “museumdat”, so listening to German academics discussing recondite subjects AND making sense of it and reporting back is just one of the many services we provide our members. To be fair, the new Germany knows how to put on a show, and I secretly expect it will be riveting, but convention and English prejudice forces me to make the public assumption that it will be as dull as Grabenwasser.

The point is — and I shall never tire of drumming this home — is that the finest picture in the world is of no use or interest to anybody if it remains locked up and unseen. It’s our job at fotoLibra to make sure our members’ images stand the best possible chance of being seen and sold, and to that end we need

• precise, concise, clinical captions
• accurate, relevant, correctly spelled keywords
• binomial names where required
• dates
• compatability with current metadata standards
• source data
• copyright assertion

fotoLibra supplies the framework to prepare the image for sale, but in our rôle as an open access picture library, we have to rely on the members to provide the data in the captions and keywords. Our automatic TypoChecker runs a crude spell check on what you’ve typed, but will get thrown by numbers, binomial names, foreign words, place names and much else. We also can’t customise it to accept common words like Harlech or Rhosllanerchrugog for some reason. fotoLibra v4.0 is pretty damn good, but we are aware there is still room for improvement.

Enough. I haven’t even been to the conference yet. A report will appear next week.

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