IPTC Information Interchange Model

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.

The full IIM specification includes a complex data structure and a set of metadata definitions.

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The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) has largely superseded IIM's file structure, but the IIM image attributes are defined in the IPTC Core schema for XMP and most image manipulation programs keep the XMP and non-XMP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

IIM attributes are widely used and supported by many image creation and manipulation programs. Almost all the IIM attributes are supported by the

.

IIM metadata can be embedded into

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.

History

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

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 "

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

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,

.

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

References

External links

• Information Interchange Model (IIM) International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
• Metadata++ — Metadata++ free software to display/modify all kind of metadata