Flickr Adds IPTC Support

Back in February, I wrote the first of a series ( number 2 and number 3) of posts on managing photo libraries. In the first post, I mentioned Flickr as an example of an online service, but noted that it did not yet support the (to me) all-important metadata standards of IPTC/XMP.

Well, blow me down, on the 11th May, Flickr announced support for IPTC metadata:

“IPTC support (finally)! Friends, today there’s another good thing in Flickrland, and that’s support for IPTC data embedded into your photos. Keywords become tags! Captions become descriptions! Marvel as one framework’s terminology is swapped for another! Smile as the location fields in IPTC become Flickr tags!”

This may prove to be the trigger to make me upgrade my free Flickr account to a Pro account, so that I can share all my photos with friends and family.

MSN Spaces needs to catch up with Flickr – the lack of support for IPTC/XMP, not only in MSN Spaces but also in any Microsoft product (from operating systems to digital photography applications) should embarrass Microsoft.