IPTC Photo Metadata Initiatives

Goals

Continue Research and Development: Update and amend the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard as industries’ needs evolve.
Promote User Materials: Provide guidelines and tools to foster a wide and consistent use of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard.
Foster Dialogue: Discuss improvements of metadata for photo and video with users, software implementers and other standardisation bodies at the annual Photo Metadata Conference. Provide a public email forum about IPTC photo metadata.
Encourage Compatible Software: Maintain a list of software compatible with the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard.
Advocate Practical Use: Link photo metadata to content metadata for generic and media-type agnostic use.

The annual Photo Metadata Conference held in May or June. Find the latest Conference or have a look at an overview of previous Conferences.

Metadata is essential for identification and copyright protection. It’s important to ensure this metadata travels with the content as a digital label, and remains with it over its lifetime.
The Embedded Metadata Manifesto campaign aims to establish the practice of applying descriptions and the copyright status of the content as metadata, and to embed it permanently during the electronic exchange of digital photo, text, audio or video files.
This practice is based on the five principles defined by the Embedded Metadata Manifesto, which invites organisations and individuals to support the campaign.
The site also lists case studies from different industries about the benefit of applying metadata to media content, and the damage done by inadvertently losing or removing metadata.