Overview

IPTC (International Press Communications Council) is a consortium of the world's major news organizations. One of their main goals is providing standards to facilitate information interchange between organizations. As such, they have developed a very complete way to annotate an image with metadata. For example:

• Description/Caption
• Copyright
• Author
• Keywords
• And much more

PhotoShelter fully supports the IPTC Core specification, which means annotations you create in programs like Photoshop will automatically be read and extracted upon upload. More importantly, if you change the metadata in the file in PhotoShelter, we will re-embed that information into files when you allow others to download them. ^*

IPTC Core

IPTC worked with Adobe to come up with a more robust specification that added more fields, and also standardized the way information was written to a file using XML. Beginning with Photoshop CS2, the full IPTC Core is accessible through the File Info panels (File -> File Info). You can also use the IPTC Core with Photoshop CS by downloading the panels from the IPTC website.

Other programs like iView Media Pro also support the IPTC Core standard. Older programs will support a 1990's version of the specification, commonly referred to as the IIMv4 (Information Interchange Module version 4) specification.

The full specification that describes each field can be found on the IPTC website:
http://www.iptc.org/IPTC4XMP/

IPTC Field Specifications

The following information is condensed from the IPTC4XMP Core 1.0 document:

Contact City

The contact information city

Contact Country

The contact information country

Contact Address

The contact information address. Comprises an optional company name and all required information to locate the building or postbox to which mail should be sent.

Contact Postal Code

The contact information denoting the local postal code.

Contact State/Province

The contact information part denoting regional information like state or province.

Contact Email(s)

The contact information email address part. Multiple email addresses can be given, separated by a comma.

Contact Phone(s)

The contact information phone number part. Multiple numbers can be given, separated by a comma.

Contact Web URL(s)

The contact information web address part. Multiple addresses can be given, separated by a comman.

City

Name of the city the content is focussing on.

Copyright Notice

Contains any necessary copyright notice for claiming the intellectual property for this news object and should identify the current owner of the copyright for the news object.

Country

Full name of the country the content is focussing on.

Country Code

Code of the country the content is focussing on. The 3 letter code should be taken from ISO 3166.

Creator

Contains preferably the name of the person who created the content of this news object, a photographer for photos, a graphic artist for graphics, or a writer for textual news.

Creator's Contact Info

The creator's contact information provides all necessary information to get in contact with the creator of this news object.

Creator's Jobtitle

Contains the job title of the person who created the content of this news object.

Date Created

Designates the date and optionally the time the intellectual content of the news object was created rather than the date of the creation of the physical representation. If no time is given the value should default to 00:00:00.

Caption/Description

A textual description, including captions, of the news object's content, particularly used where the object is not text.

Caption/Description Writer

Identifier or the name of the person involved in writing, editing or correcting the description of the news object.

Headline

A publishable entry providing a synopsis of the contents of the news object. Headline is not the same as Title

Instructions

Any of a number of instructions from the provider or creator to the recceiver of the news object which might include any of the following: embargoes (NewsMagazines OUT) and other restrictions not covered by the "Rights Usage Terms" field; information regarding the original means of capture (scanning notes, colourspace info) or other specific text information that the user may need for accurate reproduction; additional permissions or credits required when publishing.

Intellectual Genre

Describes the nature, intellectual or journalistic characteristic of a news object, not specifically its content.

Job Identifier

Number or identifier for the purpose of improved workflow handling. This ID should be added by the creator or provider for transmission and routing purposes only and should have no significance for archiving.

Keywords

Keywords to express the subject of the content. Keywords may be free text and don't have to be taken from a controlled vocabulary. Values from the controlled vocabulary IPTC Subject Codes must go to the "Subject Code" element.

Location

Name of a location the content is focussing on -- either the location shown in visual media or referenced by text or audio media. This location name could either be the name of a sublocation to a city or the name of a well known location or (natural) monument outside a city. In the sense of a sublocation to a city this element is at the fourth level of a top-down geographical hierarchy.

Credit/Provider

Identifies the provider of the news object, who is not necessarily the owner/creator.

Province/State

Name of the subregion of a country -- either called province or state or anything else -- the content is focussing on -- either the subregion shown in visual media or referenced by text or audio media. This element is at the second level of a top-down geographical hierarchy.

Rights Usage Terms

Free text instructions on how this news object can be legally used.

Scene

Describes the scene of a photo content. Specifies one ore more terms from the IPTC "Scene-NewsCodes". Each Scene is represented as a string of 6 digits in an unordered list.

Source

Identifies the original owner of the copyright for the intellectual content of the news object. This could be an agency, a member of an agency or an individual. Source could be different from Creator and from the entities in the CopyrightNotice.

Subject Code

Specifies one or more Subjects from the IPTC "Scene-NewsCodes" taxonomy to categorize the content. Each Subject is represented as a string of 8 digits in an unordered list.

Title

A shorthand reference for the news object. While a technical identifier goes to an identifier element, Title holds a short, verbal and human readable name. Title is not the same as Headline.

Adding metadata from within PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter allows you to add metadata to a single image or in batch to many images.

Adding metadata to a single image
While viewing an image from within your archive, click the IPTC tab. You can click on individual fields to edit them in place, or click the "edit all fields at once" link.

Adding metadata in batch
While viewing image thumbnails within a given folder:

• Select images by clicking the gray area surrounding an image. A select image appears with an orange border around it. Alternately, you can use the select all, visible, or none links at the top of the page.
• Click EDIT IPTC from the Batch Actions menu (or the Edit -> IPTC Info in the Archive Browser)
• Enter whatever information you want to update. If you want to clear out a field, checkmark the box next to the field, while leaving it blank.
• You can specify whether you want to overwrite or append the data to the fields.
• You can specify whether you want to make the images publicly searchable.

International Character Support

PhotoShelter currently supports the Latin Character Set (ISO-8859-1), which is the default character set for HTTP. Unicode characters (UTF-8) are converted by PhotoShelter into ISO-8859-1 when metadata is imported into the database. Because the UTF-8 namespace is larger than ISO-8859-1, you might notice some translation issues during the conversion process.

These conversion problems will arise for characters that exceed the 7-bit range of ISO-8859-1.

Please note that the metadata within your original file is never altered.

PhotoShelter is planning to support the full UTF-8 character set in the future.

FAQs

I am not using iView or Photoshop to caption and keyword. Will PhotoShelter be able to read this info?
If your program doesn't specifically mention "IPTC," it is likely that they are storing information in a proprietary way, meaning PhotoShelter will not be able to read it.

Remember, the value of this metadata (like copyright and contact information) is the interoperability between platforms and users. If you are using a proprietary system that doesn't use an open standard like IPTC, then as the image moves to other users, that information will be lost.

Does Photo Mechanic support IPTC?
As of version 4.5, Photo Mechanic will fully read and write XMP-embedded IPTC data using the IPTC Core (IPTC4XMP) schema. Please consult the CameraBits website for more info.

Does Cumulus support IPTC?
Cumulus version 6 with the Photo Suite option does support the the older IIM specification. We believe that the newer Mediadex program also supports the IIM specification.

What are the major differences between IPTC4XMP and IIM
The way that information is stored within the file is different, although to the end-user this doesn't matter. The number of fields has increased to include items like:

• Street Address
• Phone
• E-mail
• Website

A number of fields have been renamed as well.

The newer IPTC Core also has fewer limitations on field size (IIM was typically constrained to 32 or 64 characters), and has Unicode support, which allows for foreign language characters.

Do you embed the IPTC info into comps and high-res downloads?
Comps
When you allow users to download low-resolution comps, any updated IPTC metadata is embedded in the file. But be forewarned that the filesize can grow dramatically depending on how much metadata you have. It's not uncommon for the metadata to double, triple or quadruple the file size of a low-resolution file.

High Resolution
PhotoShelter will embed any updated metadata into your file during the download process.

If a user has been granted permission to download the original file, PhotoShelter will create a copy of your original with your updated metadata embedded.

If you have not give the user permission for the original, PhotoShelter will create a high resolution JPEG file with your updated metadata embedded.

Original Files
We are an archive. Your original file that was uploaded to PhotoShelter is never altered in any way. You will always be able to retrieve the exact file you uploaded.

* We do not currently re-embed metadata in PSD files and some raw files.