The Information Interchange Model (IIM) is a file structure and set of

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

attributes that can be applied to text,

image An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or Three-dimensional space, three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be di ...

s and other media types. It was developed in the early 1990s by the

International Press Telecommunications Council The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), based in London, United Kingdom, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, other news providers and news industry vendors and acts as the global standards body of the news media ...

(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. A new version of the user guide was released in May 2024. 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 The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) has largely superseded IIM's file structure, but the IIM image attributes are defined in the ''IPTC Core''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 Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA (bioinformatics), an algorithm used in protein engineering * Schema (genetic algorithms), a set of programs or bit strings that have some genotypic similarity * Schema.org, a web markup vocab ...

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 Exchangeable image file format (Exif), a specification for the image

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

used by

digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...

s. IIM metadata can be embedded into

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

/ Exif, TIFF, JPEG2000 or

Portable Network Graphics Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster graphics, raster-graphics file graphics file format, format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented ...

formatted image files. Other file formats such as

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

or PCX 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''

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

teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point (telecommunications), point-to-point and point- ...

s 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

attributes that can be applied to images. These were defined originally in 1979, and revised significantly in 1991 to be part of the IIM, but the concept really advanced in 1994 when

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American software, computer software company based in San Jose, California. It offers a wide range of programs from web design tools, photo manipulation and vector creation, through to ...

defined a specification for actually embedding the metadata into digital image files — yielding "IPTC headers." (Adobe adopted the IPTC IIM

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

.) In 2001, Adobe introduced " Extensible Metadata Platform" (XMP), which is an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

schema for the same types of

as IPTC, but is based on XML/ RDF, and is therefore inherently extensible. The effort spawned a collaboration with the IPTC, eventually producing the "IPTC Core Schema for XMP", which merges the two approaches to embedded metadata. The XMP specification describes techniques for embedding metadata in JPEG, TIFF, JPEG2000,

, PNG,

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

, SVG, Adobe Illustrator, and DNG 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 IFRA 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 white paper discusses upcoming changes to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standards which figured prominently at this event. The conference keynote was given by Andreas Trampe, head of the photo desk of ''

Stern The stern is the back or aft-most part of a ship or boat, technically defined as the area built up over the sternpost, extending upwards from the counter rail to the taffrail. The stern lies opposite the bow, the foremost part of a ship. O ...

''. Other speakers included photographers such as David Riecks and Peter Krogh, photo and news agencies such as

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide writing in 16 languages. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency ...

; representatives of standards bodies such as PLUS, IPTC, and IFRA; as well as spokespersons from the photo metadata implementers side, such as

, Apple Inc., Canon Inc., FotoWare AS, Hasselblad, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. The electronic presentations given by most of the speakers are available online from th
Photo Metadata Conference website
including a link to a report on each of the speakers' talks

External links

Information Interchange Model (IIM)
International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
Metadata++
nbsp;— Metadata++ free

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

software to display and modify all kind of metadata

References

{{reflist Metadata

Overview

History

See also

External links

References