New Software Product Adds Capabilities to K4 Publishing System,
Facilitating the Writing and Reading of High-fidelity Metadata

Pound Hill Software, a leading developer of metadata software tools, today announced MetaGrove for K4, a new software product that provides metadata capabilities to users of SoftCare’s popular K4 publishing system.

MetaGrove is the world’s first software XMP toolset for Adobe Creative Suite. The toolset optimizes the capture and display of descriptive metadata to fuel digital workflows. Plug-ins are available for Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and InCopy – and now also to integrate with K4. Building on Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) open-source labeling technology, MetaGrove improves digital media workflows and allows repurposing of digital assets by making digital media files easier to describe and faster to find.

The K4 publishing system is integrated with Adobe InCopy, allowing newspaper, magazine and book publishers to manage the entire production process, including design and editorial workflow. Pound Hill Software also plans to expand their K4 Plug-in to support Adobe InDesign in their future releases. K4 is a product of SoftCare based in Hamburg, Germany, and is distributed exclusively in the U.S. by Managing Editor Inc. (MEI).

“K4 is a robust publishing system that can be deployed in conjunction with a number of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions,” said Chris Griffin, Pound Hill’s Chief Technology Officer. “However, the product does not support XMP. As a SoftCare partner, we’ve been working closely with SoftCare, utilizing their powerful API to access K4 switch points and queues in order to integrate our metadata toolset with their publishing solution.”

MetaGrove not only adds advanced metadata functionality to K4, it also takes it to the next level by making it easier to define, capture and display the descriptive metadata that make digital media files more intelligent. “This enables more efficient digital asset management, including job processing, workflow automation and rights description,” continued Griffin.

Pound Hill developed MetaGrove for K4 as a direct result of customer requests. “For example, a major New York multimedia company, a K4 user, needed to inject hhierarchical keywords directly into their digital assets, a task that could not be accomplished using K4’s metadata implementation,” said Jury Balta, Product Marketing Manager at Pound Hill. “By using our MetaGrove for InCopy plug-in in conjunction with our new MetaGrove for K4 plug-in, the multimedia company can now easily locate and repurpose a digital asset by searching on any of the thousands of keywords in their taxonomy.”

“MetaGrove for K4 is an excellent companion to our publishing system,” said SoftCare Product Manager Niels Hufnagl. “Many of our customers have expressed a strong interest in adding advanced metadata capabilities to their K4 deployments. With MetaGrove, they will be able to write and read advanced metadata with no disruption to the overall workflow.”