IPTC data

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IPTC data is a method of storing textual information in images defined by the International Press Telecommunications Council (http://www.iptc.org). It was developed for press photographers who need to attach information to images when they are submitting them electronically but it is useful for all photographers. It provides a standard way of storing information such as captions, keywords, location and captions. Because the information is stored in the image in a standard way this information can be accessed by other IPTC aware applications.

 

Originally IPTC data was stored in a format known as IPTC IIM format but this has now been superceded by an XML based standard called XMP which has been developed by Adobe Systems Inc. The IPTC have adopted this standard and defined the "IPTC Core" schema for XMP.

 

BreezeBrowser Pro now supports XMP format for storing IPTC and XMP data in the following types of images: JPEG, TIFF, Photoshop PSD, PNG, DNG and raw files. XMP data for raw files is stored in a sidecar file which has the same filename as the raw file and a file extension of .xmp.

 

BreezeBrowser Pro always writes IPTC data using the new XMP format and can optionally write the data in IPTC IIM format to enable legacy applications which don't support XMP to read the IPTC data. The writing of IPTC data in IIM format can be enabled in preferences.

The following IPTC IIM datasets do not have equivalents in XMP format and cannot be displayed by BreezeBrowser Pro: Edit status (7), Object cycle (75), Job id (22) and Program (65). Many of the new XMP fields do not have equivalent representations in IPTC IIM format and can only be read by XMP aware applications. You can copy data from the old IPTC IIM fields to XMP using the legacy IPTC IIM tokens e.g. the token @IPTC_IIM_jobID@ can be used to copy the IPTC IIM job id field into a suitable XMP field. You can use the "Show tokens" window to display a list of tokens and their values for an image.

 

Adding or editing IPTC data does not affect the image quality. The IPTC data fields can be extracted from images and used in HTML pages (see HTML Page Generation).

 

 

References

 

Information about XMP from Adobe Systems Inc: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp

 

Information about the IPTC Core schema (aka IPTC4XMP) http://www.iptc.org/IPTC4XMP

 

Information about the IPTC IIM standard for data stored in images files can be obtained from the IPTC's web site: http://www.iptc.org/IIM

 

A list of NAA/IPTC header codes can be found here:

http://www.ap.org/apserver/userguide/codes.htm