IPTC Information Interchange Model - Wikipedia
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Metadata format used in digital files
The
Information Interchange Model
IIM
) is a file structure and set of
metadata
attributes that can be applied to text,
images
and other media types. It was developed in the early 1990s by the
International Press Telecommunications Council
(IPTC) to expedite the international exchange of news among newspapers and news agencies.
GThumb
with IPTC metadata fields for
JPG
The full IIM specification includes a complex data structure and a set of metadata definitions. A new version of the user guide was released in May 2024.
Although IIM was intended for use with all types of news items — including simple text articles — a subset found broad worldwide acceptance as the standard embedded metadata used by news and commercial photographers. Information such as the name of the photographer, copyright information and the caption or other description can be embedded either manually or automatically.
IIM metadata embedded in images are often referred to as "IPTC headers", and can be easily encoded and decoded by most popular photo editing software.
The
Extensible Metadata Platform
(XMP) has largely superseded IIM's file structure, but the IIM image attributes are defined in the
IPTC Core
schema
for XMP and most image manipulation programs keep the XMP and non-XMP IPTC attributes synchronized.
Because of its nearly universal acceptance among photographers — even amateurs — this is by far IPTC's most widely used standard. On the other hand, the use of IIM structure and metadata for text and graphics is mainly limited to European news agencies.
Overview
edit
IIM attributes are widely used and supported by many image creation and manipulation programs. Almost all the IIM attributes are supported by the
Exchangeable image file format
(Exif), a specification for the image
file format
used by
digital cameras
IIM metadata can be embedded into
JPEG
Exif
TIFF
JPEG2000
or
Portable Network Graphics
formatted image files. Other file formats such as
GIF
or
PCX
do not support IIM.
IIM's file structure technology has largely been overtaken by the
Extensible Metadata Platform
(XMP), but the IIM attribute definitions are the basis for the
IPTC Core
schema
for XMP.
Example of available fields:
IPTC field
Description
Example
Number of characters
Caption
Description of the image
Photo of a goldfish in a bowl
2000
Keywords
Keywords
Fish, Goldfish, Aquarium, Glass, Animal
unlimited number of characters (each keyword max. 64)
Credit
Credit
-Credit, e.g. To whom is being paid
Jan Jansen
32
Rights
© Copyright 2005, Jan Jansen, all rights reserved
128
Object Name
Subject
Goldfish1
64
Creation Date
Recording date
20060318
City
Place
Amsterdam
32
Province State
Province
North Holland
32
Country
Land
Netherlands
64
Special Instructions
Special instructions
not for the internet
256
Byline
Name of photographer
Jan Jansen
32
Category
Category
INT
Headline
Title
The Fish Bowl
256
Source
Source
Wikipedia
32
History
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Since the late 1970s the IPTC's activities have primarily focused on developing and publishing industry standards for the interchange of news. The first standard,
IPTC 7901
, bridged the eras of
teleprinters
and computers.
In the late 1980s development began on a standard (the
Information Interchange Model
) that would be designed to best work with computerized news editing systems.
In particular, the IPTC defined a set of IIM
metadata
attributes that can be applied to images. These were defined originally in 1979, and revised significantly in 1991 to be part of the IIM, but the concept really advanced in 1994 when
Adobe Systems
defined a specification for actually embedding the metadata into digital image files — yielding "IPTC headers."
(Adobe adopted the IPTC IIM
metadata
definitions, but not the overall IIM data structure. Photos that contain IPTC Headers appear in all other respects to be normal JPEG or TIFF images; software that does not recognize IPTC Headers will simply ignore the
metadata
.)
In 2001, Adobe introduced "
Extensible Metadata Platform
" (XMP), which is an
XML
schema for the same types of
metadata
as IPTC, but is based on XML/
RDF
, and is therefore inherently extensible. The effort spawned a collaboration with the IPTC, eventually producing the "IPTC Core Schema for XMP", which merges the two approaches to embedded metadata. The XMP specification describes techniques for embedding metadata in JPEG, TIFF,
JPEG2000
GIF
PNG
HTML
PostScript
PDF
SVG
, Adobe Illustrator, and
DNG
files. Recent versions of all the main Adobe software products, (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Framemaker, etc.) support XMP, as do an increasing number of third-party tools.
In June 2007, IPTC in cooperation with
IFRA
held the First International Photo Metadata conference, titled "Working towards a seamless photo workflow" to a standing room only crowd (over 130 attendees), prior to the CEPIC Congress, in Florence, Italy. A similar conference was held in Malta in June 2008.
The IPTC Photo Metadata working group released a white paper,
which figured prominently at this event. The conference keynote was given by Andreas Trampe, head of the photo desk of
Stern
. Other speakers included photographers such as David Riecks and Peter Krogh, photo and news agencies such as
Reuters
; representatives of standards bodies such as PLUS, IPTC, and IFRA; as well as spokespersons from the photo metadata implementers side, such as
Adobe Systems
Apple Inc.
Canon Inc.
FotoWare AS
Hasselblad
, and
Microsoft
The electronic presentations given by most of the speakers are available online from the
Photo Metadata Conference website
Archived
2011-05-11 at the
Wayback Machine
including a link to a report on each of the speakers' talks
See also
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ExifTool
, an open-source program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, video, and PDF metadata
gThumb
, an image viewer with IPTC reading/writing support
External links
edit
Information Interchange Model (IIM)
International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
Metadata++
— Metadata++ free
Microsoft Windows
software to display and modify all kind of metadata
References
edit
Anon (22 March 2024).
"IPTC Photo Metadata user guide"
IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group
. London, United Kingdom
. Retrieved
2024-06-11
Löffler, Harald (2007), Baranger, Walt; Steidl, Michael (eds.),
Photo Metadata White Paper 2007
, IPTC
. The white paper discusses upcoming changes to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standards
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