Categories

Archives

Dec 19 2024 IPTC’s 2024 in review: a year of AI, provenance and partnerships

2024 has flown by, but it was a great year for IPTC.

The highlight was definitely the creation of the IPTC’s first new Committee in many years – the Media Provenance Committee, with its working groups for Advocacy and Education, Best Practices and Implementation, and Governance.

Thanks to our Committee Chair Bruce MacCormack (and previous Chair Judy Parnall), and Working Group leads Helge O. Svela, Laura Ellis and Charlie Halford for all their hard work.

With the Committee we launched the Origin Verified News Publisher List this year, with demos and events at IBC in September and NAB New York in October.

The Media Provenance Summit held in the UK in October drew over 70 representatives from news organisations from Africa to Iceland to understand what we are doing in the area of C2PA and media provenance. Thanks to the BBC and Media Cluster Norway for organising the event.

The Committee’s latest milestone is the updating of its governance guidelines to make it easier for Verified News Publishers to obtain certificates. More information will be announced very soon.

Our other Working Groups under the Standards Committee have not been idle – this year has seen new versions of NewsML-G2, ninjs 3.0, Photo Metadata 2024.1, several updates to our NewsCodes vocabularies, including updates to the widely-used Digital Source Type vocabulary, and a forthcoming update to Sport Schema.

Our standards are being used by many of the biggest organisations in the world. Google uses IPTC metadata for AI transparency (among other things). Axel Springer spoke at our Autumn Meeting about how they use Video Metadata Hub to manage their Video On Demand system. AFP and Kairntech talked about how they auto-classify content using Media Topics. And many more of course!

We published advice on using IPTC Photo Metadata for AI-generated images as part of an update to the Photo Metadata User Guide – both to mark their creation and to declare the owner’s intent on whether the image should be used as part of a training data set.

Our partnerships have never been stronger. We signed new liaison agreements with CIPA, EIDR and Global Media Registry. Our latest collaboration with DPP was the Live Production Exchange project, based on IPTC’s ninjs 3.0 standard.

We submitted position papers to the IETF workshop on AI Control and to the EU’s consultation on the AI Act, making the case for respecting embedded metadata in determining whether media files can be used as training data for AI engines.

We had many new members join: Google, Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle, HAND (Human & Digital), China Association of Press Technicians, Kairntech, DW (Deutsche Welle), Factiverse, Media Cluster Norway, RNZ, John Simmons. European Broadcasting Union (upgraded to Voting Membership), and Trufo. We’re very happy to have you all onboard!

We had two amazing member meetings: one physical meeting in New York (thanks to The New York Times and The Associated Press for hosting us) and one virtual meeting in the Autumn. Our attendees especially loved the guides tours of the NYT and AP archives. We’re already planning the next Spring Meeting which will be held in Juan-les-Pins, France in May 2025.

The IPTC Photo Metadata Conference in May saw Adobe, Camera Bits, Foto Forensics, Numbers Protocol and others present many aspects of photo metadata to celebrate 20 years of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard.

We gave presentations about IPTC standards in the Netherlands, UK, Brazil, USA and France – and probably other places too!

Here’s to achieving even bigger things in 2025!

Thanks for all your help and support.

Dec 19 2024 Photo Metadata Standard updated to version 2024.1

At the IPTC Autumn Meeting, the IPTC Standards Committee voted on a change proposed by the Photo Metadata Working Group, which created version 2024.1 of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard.

The change is minor but important to some: the definition of the Keywords property now includes the following text:

Keywords to express the subject and other aspects of the content of the image. Keywords may be free text and don’t have to be taken from a controlled vocabulary. Codes from the controlled vocabulary IPTC Subject NewsCodes must go to the “Subject Code” field.

This aligns the property definition with the way in which many photo agencies and photographers were already using the field: to convey aspects such as the lighting or lens effects used, “mood” of the image, dominant colour and more.

We give examples of how the Keywords property may be used in the IPTC Photo Metadata User Guide.

The relevant files have all been updated for the new version:

We thank Agence France-Presse for their help in offering examples for how the Keywords property may be used.

 

Dec 9 2024 IPTC launches ninjs 3.0 in association with DPP’s Live Production Exchange

The IPTC has worked together with the DPP and stakeholders from Reuters, Arqiva and Warner Brothers Discovery to develop a pioneering new initiative called DPP Live Production Exchange (LPX). The LPX protocol covers API and a data schema for information related to news coverage of live events, including the ability for B2B event subscribers to be informed about upcoming news events and their coverage.

IPTC’s contribution to the project was to enhance and evolve our ninjs (News in JSON) standard to support news coverage of events and  live streamed content. The News in JSON Working Group dedicated a lot of its time to this work over the past two years, including participating in the DPP LPX Hackathon in Spring 2024.

Screenshot of the DPP LPX website JSON Schema page

The underlying data model for the events and planning work in ninjs comes from the IPTC News Architecture and is based on EventsML-G2, a part of the NewsML-G2 family of standards which was created over 10 years ago.

Ian Young of PA Media, Lead of the IPTC News in JSON Working Group, said “Basing the work of ninjs 3.0 on the stable foundation of the IPTC News Architecture made our work much simpler. IPTC members have been syndicating news events for years using this model so we know that it works. That meant that we could focus on making ninjs 3.0 handle live events and streaming video in a way that is practical and simple, both for developers and for users.”

IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn said “we owe our thanks to our teammates and partners on this project: David Thompson from IPTC liaison partners the DPP, JJ Eynon from CNN / Warner Brothers Discovery, Tania Vivero and Ian McLaren from Reuters (IPTC Voting Member), and Daniel Lynch from Arqiva (IPTC Associate Member). Through a very friendly and collegial but also productive and results-driven collaboration, we have arrived at a solution that should make syndicated news events much easier to handle in all newsroom workflows.”

ninjs 3.0 and the LPX API are or will soon be supported by tools from Arqiva, Reuters and Wolftech (who were recently acquired by Avid). We hope that many more implementations will be emerge in the coming months.

For more on ninjs 3.0, see the following resources:

Categories

Archives