At the 2024 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference, James Lockman of Adobe’s Digital Media Services division demonstrated the Custom Metadata Panel, a tool that allows users to create their own user interface for editing sets of metadata fields. Since that time, the IPTC has worked with James and his team to make the tool even more useful, supporting the full set of IPTC properties and even enabling IPTC Photo Metadata as the default view in the tool.

The plugin can be installed from the Adobe Exchange plugin directory, and more information is available on the plugin’s GitHub repository, in particular the repository’s wiki pages.

For guidance on how to use the Custom Metadata Panel for editing IPTC metadata specifically, the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group has created both a guide to installing the Custom Metadata Panel and a user guide for editing IPTC Photo Metadata using the Adobe Custom Metadata Panel. Together, the guidance pages explain how to install the tool, how to set it up for editing IPTC metadata, and some specific advice for editing particular types of metadata using the tool.

Support for both photo and video metadata

The Custom Metadata Panel also supports IPTC’s equivalent standard for video content, IPTC Video Metadata Hub. We will add guidance in the future for how it can be used to edit Video Metadata Hub metadata from within Adobe Premiere Pro.

The IPTC thanks James and his team for their work on the panel and for enhancing it so well over the past 12 months to turn it into a real power tool for media managers who want the full power of IPTC Photo Metadata at their fingertips.

Hands-on metadata workshop in Juan les Pins, France in May 2025

IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn will run a workshop on Wednesday 14th May showing users how to activate the plugin and how to use it to edit metadata for various purposes. This workshop will take place as part of the IPTC Day at CEPIC 2025, and so will be accessible to attendees of CEPIC 2025 and of the IPTC 2025 Spring Meeting.