Software industry legend Tim Bray gave a resounding call to IPTC and to others working on media provenance and C2PA: his verdict was that while the specification and its implementation had issues, they were slowly being resolved and he lauded the project’s goal of “making it harder for liars to lie and easier for truth tellers to be believed”.

The 2025 Photo Metadata Conference, held on September 18th, was a great success, with 280 registered attendees from hundreds of organisations around the world. Video recordings from the event are now available.

Speakers included:

• David Riecks, lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, describing some new IPTC Photo Metadata properties concerning Generative AI models and prompts that will be proposed for a vote at the next Standards Committee meeting to be held at the IPTC Autumn Meeting.
• Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC, gave an update on the IPTC’s guidelines for opting out of Generative AI training and ongoing work to standardise AI training preferences at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
• Ottar A. B. Anderson, Head of Photography at SEDAK, the GLAM imaging service of Møre og Romsdal County in Norway, spoke about Metadata for Image Quality in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) and his work on the Digital Object Authenticity Working Group.
• David Riecks gave an update on IPTC Photo Metadata Panel in Adobe Custom Metadata.
• AI caption tagging for the Superbowl – Jerry Lai, Senior Director of Content, Imagn Images – Download Jerry’s slides
• Paul Reinitz, previously with Getty Images and now a consultant on business and legal issues around copyright, spoke about recent developments in the area including updates in the US, EU and China
• Brendan Quinn spoke again to give an update on the IPTC’s work with C2PA and the world of Media Provenance, including our work on the Verified News Publishers List
• Tim Bray, creator of tech standards like XML and Atom and companies like OpenText 
• Marcos Armstrong of CBC / Radio Canada spoke about his work on mapping image publishing workflows at CBC.

Videos of all sessions are publicly available from the event page at https://iptc.org/events/photo-metadata-conference-2025/.

Feedback from the event was almost universally positive:

• “While I knew I wouldn’t understand all of the terms, I was so impressed the amount of topics that were touched upon. I had no problem following along. I loved the passion and the openess to different perspectives”
• “Great topic choices- perfect level of beginner/more advanced content presentation.”
• “It was a good critical look at the pluses and minuses of various decisions being made, ultimately pointing to developing public trust about authorship.”
• “Informative, I really liked the expertise all the speaker brought to the virtual table”
• “Learning about strategies to protect from and tools for blocking AI, as well as metadata fields to record AI use”
• “Informative, good presentations and presenters. Very relevant to today – AI.”
• “Focus on Content Credentials and AI. Range of speaker roles provided different perspectives on the topic area. Excellent organization, presentation quality and management of the zoom space.”
• “Three things in particular stood out. Tim Bray’s talk was great as it brought everything to my world as a photographer and is pretty much what I’ve found. Brendan Quinn’s opt out information was definitely worth knowing and now I’m going to look at it. Finally, David Riecks talk about Adobe’s Metadata Panel gave me more insight into it and if it should be included in my workflow but his information for the proposed new properties for Generative AI was very good to hear.”

Thanks to everyone who attended and to our speakers David, Brendan, Paul, Ottar, Tim and Marcos.

Special thanks to David and the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group for organising the event.

We look forward to seeing even more attendees next year!

To be sure of being notified about next year’s event, subscribe to the (very low volume) “Friends of IPTC Newsletter”.