IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2026

Online – 3 September 2026: 15.00 to 18.00 UTC

The 2026 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference was held online on Thursday 3rd September. Topics included the use of photo metadata to enable business workflows, latest developments in IPTC and other metadata standards, news on adoption of existing metadata standards around accessibility, content provenance, AI opt-out, signalling of AI-generated content and more.

Agenda

15.00 – 15.10: Welcome and Introduction

Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC

Brendan Quinn welcomed everyone to the event, gave an update on what has been happening at IPTC over the past 12 months, and introduces the agenda for the next few hours.

15.10 – 15.40: Auditing AI engines’ readiness for AI legislation

Alexios Mantzarlis, founder of Indicator Media

AI providers and big tech platforms have new labeling obligations under the EU AI Act and the California AI Transparency Act. Over the course of three audits, Indicator Media found that the road to industry-wide compliance is still long.

15:40 – 16:00: Planned updates to IPTC Photo Metadata

David Riecks and Ottar A.B. Anderson

David Riecks, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, takes us through the group’s recent work, including some of the proposals for updates to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard being proposed to the Standards Committee in a few weeks at the IPTC Autumn Meeting. Some of those changes include updates to handle cultural preservation metadata, presented by Ottar A.B.Anderson of the Digital Object Authenticity Working Group (DOAWG).

16:00 – 16:30: IPTC C2PA Best Practice guidelines

Brendan Quinn

Brendan Quinn takes us through the IPTC’s recent work on creating best-practice guidelines for implementing C2PA in the news and media industries, including the use of CAWG Identity Assertions, metadata best practices and IPTC’s forthcoming best practices book.

16:30 – 17:30: Metadata Safari: standards in the wild

Cindy Han (Trufo), James Lockman (Adobe), Erik Svilich (Encypher), Dennis Walker (Camera Bits) and Øystein Syversen (Fotoware)

We take attendees on a “safari” in a series of short demos showcasing how products available today implement standards from IPTC C2PA and CAWG right now.

Direct links to each vendor’s sessions:

17:30 – 18:00: Tracking usage of image metadata in the news industry

Brendan Quinn, IPTC

Brendan Quinn introduces IPTC’s new public service that monitors real-world usage of metadata in images across the global news industry, tracking IPTC/XMP, C2PA, AI opt-outs and more. Who will be on top of the ranking tables?

See the event minisite for more speaker details.

Previous Conferences

The IPTC Photo Metadata Conference has been held regularly since 2007.

Watch video recordings and see presentation slides from our previous events: