Swiss photo agency Kursiv plans to release KIM Keywording in early summer. Set to preview in Malta during the CEPIC 2008 Congress, the new software is intended for professional image agencies and photographers with e-commerce offerings as well as corporations that shoot or use large volumes of images.

Designed to speed up and improve keywording of large image volumes, the package imports and exports IPTC metadata in multiple formats. It also supports additional data fields, operates in both PC and Macintosh environments and can process information in up to 10 languages simultaneously.

Kursiv makes its home in an old industrial building in Wittenbach, Switzerland, and the agency has a major presence in the local stock-licensing market. Offering over 9 million images from 80 collections, Kursiv is the exclusive local representative of many globally recognized brands. These include Alamy, Blend and EyeCandy alongside nonexclusives such as Corbis and Digital Vision.

This month, Kursiv became the Swiss rep of a 2-year-old Outdoor-Archiv, a German rights-managed agency that specializes in outdoor sports, leisure, nature and travel imagery.

In addition to licensing individual images, Kursiv markets image CDs and, since 2005, an online subscription product. In 2006, its new brand of BilderStock launched to become the sixth collection offered by subscription. The primarily European brand is based on products of Ingram Publishing and SuperStock and contains over 100,000 print-resolution images, which are available under plans that allow up to a 1,000 downloads per month.

Two years ago, Kursiv began to provide customized services to large companies. Marking its next growth phase, the agency created an image database for global financial services provider UBS. The database is a pre-screened library of images suitable for use by UBS, selected from the entire Kursiv collection based on specific branding guidelines. Hosted by the image agency, the UBS database is available to its employees worldwide and is administered by UBS staff. Once an image is selected, Kursiv handles licensing and invoicing.