Defining the boundary between authentic news and synthetic content has never been more critical. In 2025, IPTC didn’t just participate in that conversation—we led it.

Through a record year of new memberships and global events spanning from Juan-les-Pins to New York, we connected thousands of professionals to the future of media technology. Whether through new AI opt-out mechanisms or robust provenance tools, our work is now empowering hundreds of the world’s leading organisations to face the challenges of tomorrow.

Here is a look at the milestones, events, and releases that defined our work in 2025.

Global Connections: A Year of Events

This year, we prioritised bringing the media community together to solve shared challenges. From exclusive member gatherings to public conferences, we held events around the world – and plan to be even more international in 2026. Our events included:

• Member Meetings: We kicked off the year with our Spring Meeting in Juan-les-Pins, France, held alongside CEPIC. It was a vital opportunity to bring IPTC members together and align with the licensed photography world. Later in the year, our Autumn Meeting was held online, allowing our global membership to convene efficiently to discuss strategy and standards updates.
• Media Provenance Series: Trust was a central theme of 2025. We partnered with leading organisations to host a series of high-impact events focused on Media Provenance:
  • Paris: Held at the AFP offices, IPTC participated in this event that was organised by AFP along with the BBC and Media Cluster Norway.
  • New York: The Content Authenticity Summit was held at the Cornell University campus. IPTC co-hosted the event in association with the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and C2PA.
  • Bergen, Norway: A landmark event held in association with Media Cluster Norway, the BBC, and the EBU.
• Photo Metadata Conference: Our annual conference remains a must-attend event for the industry, this year attracting more than 200 attendees to hear from industry legends such as Tim Bray on the technical evolution of visual media.

Critical Guidelines for the AI Era

As Generative AI continues to reshape the landscape, the IPTC provided the industry with the necessary guidance to adapt.

• AI Opt-Out: We published comprehensive guidelines allowing content owners to express their machine learning and data mining preferences, ensuring publishers retain control over how their content is ingested by AI crawlers.
• Implementing C2PA: While the demand for provenance is high, the technical path can be complex. We released specific guidelines on implementing C2PA for news publishers, helping newsrooms bridge the gap between technical specification and practical workflow application.

Powering the Industry: Standards and Tools

We continued to maintain and evolve the technical backbone of the news industry. 2025 saw significant updates across our portfolio to ensure our standards remain modern and accessible.

New Standard Versions We published updated versions of our core standards, including NewsML-G2, IPTC Video Metadata Hub, IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, and ninjs (News in JSON). We also made many updates to the IPTC NewsCodes controlled vocabularies, ensuring that our taxonomies keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

Open Source Tooling To lower the barrier to entry for developers, we expanded our open-source offerings. This year we released a new Python module for NewsML-G2 and a WordPress plugin for C2PA, making it easier than ever for CMS developers and newsrooms to implement IPTC standards directly.

Online Tools Tools such as the Simple Rights Service make it easier than ever for rightsholders to express complex rights statements in the form of simple URLs. And of course our Origin Verify Validator allows anyone to inspect content signed with C2PA metadata, including all of the metadata fields recommended by IPTC and showing when the publisher that signed the content is on the Origin Verified News Publishers List.

Be Part of the Future

As we look toward 2026, the intersection of AI, provenance, and metadata will only become more critical.

If you want to be part of the conversation rather than just following it, we invite you to join us. By becoming an IPTC member, you can contribute to the standards that run the global news ecosystem and network with the technical leaders of the world’s biggest media organisations.

Become a Member of IPTC and help us build the future of media standards

We would like to thank our members, Working Group leads, volunteers and invited experts for their contributions to IPTC’s vital work this year. We look forward to many more years of defining and influencing technology standards for the media and beyond.