The IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group has chosen the vendors who will be presenting at the “Metadata Safari” component of the 2026 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference. This completes the agenda for this year’s event, which will be held online at 15:00 UTC on Thursday 3rd September.

We received a wide range of very compelling pitches, but couldn’t choose them all due to time constraints. We will be inviting the remaining vendors to present to an IPTC Working Group meeting or at a future IPTC event.

The vendors chosen this year are:

• Camera Bits, makers of Photo Mechanic, who will demonstrate how Photo Mechanic® works with C2PA-signed photos, starting with Live Ingest of photos from a C2PA-enabled Sony camera. This will show how Camera Bits’ patent-pending Provenance Locker™ technology enables multiple metadata (e.g. IPTC) edits to be safely applied to C2PA photos yet still retain the full provenance of the original camera photo for use as a parent ingredient for subsequent C2PA signing including adding an Imatag watermark.

• Fotoware, makers of Fotostation and the Digital Asset Management products Fotoware Veloz and Fotoware Alto. Fotoware will showcase a real-world production workflow from a leading sports photography agency, demonstrating how images move seamlessly from capture to publication while preserving and enriching metadata at every stage. The demonstration will include automatic image ingestion directly from cameras via FTP into Fotoware, immediate metadata enrichment and validation using IPTC standards, rapid search and distribution workflows, and end-to-end publishing processes used in an editorial environment.

  A particularly compelling aspect of the presentation is how IPTC metadata serves as the backbone of the entire workflow. We can demonstrate how photographers, editors, archivists and publishing teams all rely on the same trusted metadata as images progress through different stages of production. From automatic tagging and rights information to editorial instructions, discoverability and content distribution.

  Fotoware will also demonstrate C2PA support across the entire workflow, showing how content provenance and authenticity information can be maintained and verified from ingestion through editing, management and publication. We believe this provides a practical example of how industry standards work together to create trusted and transparent media workflows.

• Adobe who will be presenting a new version of the Photo Metadata Panel plug-in which unlocks asset-level metadata in Bridge, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. Custom Metadata is a panel for Adobe Creative apps and Bridge that exposes standards-compliant, customisable forms for reading and writing asset-level XMP metadata. Recent updates added support fractional number formatting, arrays of Language Alternative arrays, and Adobe Experience Manager-sourced metadata. Starter panels for PRISM, IPTC Genre and IPTC Media Topics, which uses a new hierarchical tags UI, were also added.
• Encypher will show a live WordPress publishing workflow in which a news photograph carrying IPTC Photo Metadata is signed with C2PA and CAWG organisational identity, then published with machine-readable CAWG v1.2 training/mining and ODRL rights signals
• Trufo will showcase the range of different C2PA/CAWG implementation options our customers are adopting at production-level. This ranges from in-house (with Trufo providing certificates and timestamps) to fully-managed (where Trufo operates a generator product under a customer’s name and the customer interfaces with it via API) and options in between.

This will be just one of the sessions at this year’s conference. Other sessions include Alexios Mantzarlis from Indicator Media auditing AI providers’ readiness for AI legislation; a discussion on new properties proposed to be added to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, and the unveiling of a new tool to compare metadata implementations at major news providers around the world.

Attendance is open for anyone, this event is not limited to IPTC members. You can register for free at the event website.