IPTC Photo Metadata and ExifTool
The IPTC-Photo-Metadata-Standard is a widely used set of metadata fields for descriptive, administrative, copyright and licensing information about images.
Phil Harvey’s ExifTool is a widely used software tool for reading and writing metadata of many different standards embedded into an image or video file. From its early days on it supported to read and write all specified IPTC Photo Metadata fields and therefore it became a highly liked tool for people using the IPTC standard.
This document helps people working with the IPTC Standard and using ExifTool for this purpose.
More help in using the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard can be found it it’s User Guide.
A full description of ExifTool can be found on its website https://exiftool.org - it also can be downloaded from this site.
ExifTool short intro
The basic software of Exiftool is a platform-independant Perl library. To make its use easier a command line version for Windows and MacOS is provided too. In Linux computers the Perl library can be used from the command line.
Therefore executing ExifTool via its command line is its regular direct use by metadata folks. As many programming languages allow executing an external program or library via a command line call ExifTool can also be used by languages like Python, JavaScript/Node.js, PHP, C# or even C++.
A full documentation of the installed version of ExifTool can be read after calling exiftool on the command line - without any parameters. (By usual operating system features the shown help text can be written to a text file.)
The basic call of ExifTool is exiftool [OPTIONS] FILE. The optional OPTIONS are explained in the documentation (see above), FILE stands for the name of an image file.
More about the use of ExifTool’s command line for IPTC Photo Metadata is explained by the chapters listed below.
References
Related tools and standards
| Name | Source |
|---|---|
See https://exiftool.org - from there the latest and earlier versions of this tool can be downloaded |
|
Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), see https://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/ and https://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp.html - the specification is published in three parts. |
|
Exchangeable Image file Format (Exif), created and published by the Camera & Imaging Products Assocation CIPA (Japan). Find CIPA documents in English at https://www.cipa.jp/e/std/std-sec.html. Document "CIPA DC-008-Translation 2019 … Exif Version 2.32" is used for the 2.3x mapping, document "CIPA DC-008-Translation 2023 … Exif Version 3.0" is used for the 3.0 mapping. |
|
IPTC Information Interchange Model created and published by IPTC: https://iptc.org/IIM/ and https://iptc.org/std/IIM/4.2/specification/IIMV4.2.pdf |
|
Standard for administrative, descriptive, and copyright information about images created and published by IPTC: overview at https://iptc.org/standards/photo-metadata/iptc-standard/, specifications at https://iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata |
|
The guide for a proper use of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard - see https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/userguide/ |
|
The XMP Part 1 document is the ISO standard 16684-1. Latest version: Second Edition of 2019-04. |
|
Picture Licensing Universal System created and published by PLUS: find specifications at http://ns.useplus.org |
|
Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity behind a vocabulary for structured data on the Internet. See the overview of schemas provided by this community. |
|
W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF), find an overview at https://www.w3.org/RDF/ |
ExifTool User Guide History
(Latest entry at the top of the list)
- June 2024
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Work on a draft started
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