DALL-E image: "An abstract painting of new year's fireworks in the sky, over an sea made of electronic circuit boards"
Image generated by DALL-E, based on the prompt: “An abstract painting of new year’s fireworks in the sky, over an sea made of electronic circuit boards”

Here is a wrap-up of IPTC has been up to in 2022, covering our latest work, including updates to most of our key standards.

Two successful member meetings and five member webinars

This year we again held our member meetings online, in May and October. We had over 70 registered attendees each time, from over 40 organisations, which is well over half of our member organisations so it shows that the virtual format works well.

This year we had guests from United Robots, Kairntech, EDRLab, AxateHAND Identity, RealityDefender.ai, synthetic media consultant Henrik de Gyor and metaverse expert Toby Allen, as well as member presentations from The New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Refinitiv (an LSE Group company), DATAGROUP ConsultingTT Sweden, iMatrics and more. And that’s not even counting our regular Working Group presentations! So we had a very busy three days in May and October.

We also had some very interesting members-only webinars including a deep dive into ninjs 2.0, JournalList and the trust.txt protocol, a joint webinar with the EBU on how Wikidata and IPTC Media Topics can be used together, and a great behind the scenes question-and-answer session with a product manager from Wikidata itself.

Recordings of all presentations and webinars are available to IPTC members in the Members-Only Zone.

A fascinating Photo Metadata Conference

This year’s IPTC Photo Metadata Conference was held online in November and we had over 150 registrants and 19 speakers from Microsoft, CBC Radio Canada, BBC, Adobe, Content Authenticity Initiative, the Smithsonian and more. The general theme was bringing the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard to the real world, focussing on adoption of the recently-introduced accessibility properties, looking at adoption and interoperability between different software tools, including a new comparison tool that we have introduced; use of C2PA and Content Authenticity in newsroom workflows, with demos from the BBC and CBC (with Microsoft Azure).

We also had an interesting session discussing the future of AI-generated images and how metadata could help to identify which images are synthetic, the directions and algorithms used to create them, and whether or not the models were trained on copyrighted images.

Recordings of all sessions are available online.

Presentations at other conferences, work with other organisations

IPTC was represented at the CEPIC Congress in Spain, the DigiTIPS conference run by imaging.org, the Sports Video Group’s content management group, and several Project Origin events.

Our work with C2PA is progressing well. As of version 1.2 of the C2PA Specification, assertions can now include any property from IPTC Photo Metadata Standard and/or IPTC Video Metadata Hub. C2PA support is growing in tools and is now available in Adobe Photoshop.

IPTC is also working with Project Origin on enabling C2PA in the news industry.

We had an IPTC member meet-up at the NAB Show in Las Vegas in May.

We also meet regularly with Google, schema.org, CIPA (the camera-makers behind the Exif standard), ISO, CEPIC and more.

Standard and Working Group updates

  • Our IPTC NewsCodes vocabularies had regular updates each quarter, including 12 new terms at least 20 retired terms. See the details in our news posts about the September Update, July Update, May Update, and the February Update (in time for the Winter Olympics). We also extended the Digital Source Type vocabulary specifically to address “synthetic media” or AI-generated content.
  • The News in JSON Working Group released ninjs 1.4, a parallel release for those who can’t upgrade to ninjs 2.0 which was released in 2021. We published a case study showing how Alamy uses ninjs 2.0 for its content API.
  • NewsML-G2 v2.31 includes support for financial instruments without the need to attach them to organisations.
  • Photo Metadata Standard 2022.1 includes a Contributor structure aligned with Video Metadata Hub which can handle people who worked on a photograph but did not press the shutter, such as make-up artists, stylists or set designers;
  • The Sports Content Working Group is working on the IPTC Sport Schema, which is pre-release but we are showing it to various stakeholders before a wider release for feedback. If you are interested, please let me know!
  • Video Metadata Hub 1.4 includes new properties for accessibility, content warnings, AI-generated content, and clarifies the meanings of many other properties.

New faces at IPTC

We waved farewell to Johan Lindgren of TT as a Board Member, after five years of service. Thankfully Johan is staying on as Lead of the News in JSON Working Group.

We welcomed long-time member Heather Edwards of The Associated Press as our newest board member.

We welcomed Activo, Data Language, Denise Kremer, MarkLogic, Truefy, Broadcast Solutions and Access Intelligence as new IPTC members, plus Swedish publisher Bonnier News who are joining at the start of 2023. We’re very happy to have you all as members!

If you are interested in joining, please fill out our membership enquiry form.

Web site updates

We launched a new, comprehensive navigation bar on this website, making it easier to find our most important content.

We have also just launched a new section highlighting the “themes” that IPTC is watching across all of our Working Groups:

We would love to hear what you think about the new sections, which hopefully bring the site to life.

Best wishes to all for a successful 2023!

Thanks to everyone who has supported IPTC this year, whether as members, speakers at our events, contributors to our standards development or software vendors implementing our standards. Thanks for all your support, and we look forward to working with you more in the coming year.

If you have any questions or comments, you can contact me directly at mdirector@iptc.org.

Best wishes,

Brendan Quinn
Managing Director, IPTC

Video Metadata Hub explainer diagram

The IPTC Video Metadata Working Group is proud to announce the release of version 1.4 of the group’s standard, Video Metadata Hub.

See the updated properties table, updated mappings table and updated guidelines document.

All changes can be used immediately in Video Metadata Hub use cases, particularly in C2PA assertions (described in our recent post).

Version 1.4 introduces several new properties and several changes to add accessibility properties and to align it more closely with the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard:

New properties:
  • Content Warning: signals to viewers such as drug references, nudity or violence, and health warnings such as flashing lights.

  • Digital Source Type: whether the content was created by a digital camera, scanned from film, or created using or with the assistance of a computer.

  • Review Rating: a third-party review such as a film’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

  • Workflow Rating: equivalent to the XMP rating field, a numeric scale generally used by creators to tag shots/takes/videos that are of higher quality.

  • Alt Text (Accessibility): Short text describing the video to those who cannot view it.

  • Extended Description (Accessibility): Longer description more fully describing the purpose and meaning of the video, elaborating on the information given in the Alt Text (Accessibility) property.

  • Timed Text Link: refers to an external file used for text with timing information using a standard such as WebVTT or W3C Timed Text, usually used for subtitles, closed captions or audio description

Changed properties:
  • Date Created: modified description to align it with Photo Metadata.

  • Rating: modified description to make it more specifically about audience content classifications such as MPA ratings

  • Data Displayed on Screen: changed description.

  • Keywords: Pluralised label to match the equivalent in Photo Metadata.

  • Title: changed data type to allow multiple languages

  • Transcript: changed data type to allow multiple languages

  • Copyright Year: changed description to add “year of origin of the video”

  • Embedded Encoded Rights Expression: property label changed from “Rights and Licensing Terms (1)” to clarify and align with Photo Metadata

  • Linked Encoded Rights Expression: property label changed from “Rights and Licensing Terms (2)” to clarify and align with Photo Metadata

  • Copyright Owner: label change label from “Rights Owner” to align with Photo Metadata

  • Source (Supply Chain): Change label and XMP property to align it with Photo Metadata

New property structures:
  • Qualified Link with Language: used by Times Text Link, specifies an external file along with its role (eg “audio description”) and human language (eg “Spanish”)

Changed property structures:
  • “Embedded Encoded Rights Expression Structure” changed label from “Embedded Rights Expression Structure” to align with Photo Metadata

  • “Linked Encoded Rights Expression Structure” changed label from “Linked Rights Expression Structure” to align with Photo Metadata

  • Data type of “Role” in the “Entity with Role” structure was changed from URI to Text to align with Photo Metadata

The Video Metadata Hub mapping tables also include mappings to the DPP AS-11 and MovieLabs MDDF formats.

The Video Metadata Hub Generator can be used to explore the properties in the standard.

Please contact IPTC or the public Video Metadata discussion group with any questions or suggestions.