The IPTC Photo Metadata Standard is widely used by photographers, photo agencies and other photo suppliers around the world. To help photo people use it properly, IPTC has a specification document with a lot of details in document form.

Now, we have released a machine-readable version of the spec that can be consumed directly by software tools.

We call it the IPTC Photo Metadata TechReference. (See below for direct links to the data files.)

The TechReference is a data object containing all the details of the IPTC Photo Metadata technical specifications in the easy-to-use JSON and YAML formats.

The file covers all IPTC properties and structures.

For each property, we specify:

• the property’s formal name
• corresponding identifiers in the ISO XMP and the IPTC IIM formats, if applicable;
• the property’s datatype, such as string, number or a custom property structure like Location; and
• the property identifier that can be used with ExifTool to read or write the metadata property (such as “XMP-dc:creator” for XMP or “IPTC:Creator” for IIM);
• … and a few more details.

We have also published rich documentation about the TechReference data object on the IPTC website. The data objects themselves can be downloaded from the IPTC site by both IPTC members and other interested parties.

Links:

• Documentation on the TechReference data object
• The file in JSON format: https://iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/iptc-pmd-techreference_2019.1.json
• The file in YAML format: https://iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/iptc-pmd-techreference_2019.1.yml