Glossary
IPTC
IPTC is a metadata standard for editorial information — caption, creator, credit, copyright and keywords — rather than camera settings.
Updated
Also written: IPTC IIM, IPTC Information Interchange Model.
Where EXIF describes the capture, IPTC describes the editorial context: who made the picture, who to credit, what it shows, what the usage terms are. It came out of the news industry, where a photograph moves between a photographer, an agency and a publisher and has to carry that information with it.
In a JPEG it is stored inside a Photoshop resource block within an APP13 marker segment — a format that reflects its history rather than any technical necessity.
This is the block most worth thinking twice about before removing. For a working photographer the copyright and creator fields are the machine-readable assertion of authorship, and stripping them from published work removes the claim rather than protecting anything.
Related terms
- XMP — XMP is an extensible, XML-based metadata format that can carry arbitrary fields, embedded in a file or kept alongside it as a sidecar.
- EXIF — EXIF is the metadata standard cameras use to record how, when and where a photo was taken, stored inside the image file itself.
- APP marker segment — An APP marker segment is a labelled block in a JPEG file where applications store metadata, ahead of the compressed image data.