Last week IPTC did something we had never tried before: we ran a complete three-day member meeting virtually, using videoconferencing, which worked very well! Thanks to all our participants and presenters.

Spread over three days, over 50 attendees from the majority of IPTC member organisations across 16 countries heard over 20 presentations from IPTC Working Groups, IPTC member organisations and invited speakers on topics from AI-generated stock photography to tracking entities in news stories. The culmination of the event was the approval of new versions of ninjs, NewsML-G2 and Video Metadata Hub, and the (re-)election of Robert Schmidt-Nia as Chair of IPTC.

Monday: Photo Metadata, Sport and Web Publications

Monday set the tone with an introduction from IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn, and introductions from all attendees. Michael Steidl gave the first Working Group update as Lead of the Photo Metadata Working Group, covering the group’s wide-ranging work over the past six months including releasing the Photo Metadata Standard 2019.1 including Image Regions, plus partnership projects with Google on exposing embedded IPTC Photo Metadata fields in search results, and emerging work with camera industry association CIPA and schema.org.

Laurent Le Meur, previous IPTC board member and currently CTO at EDRLab, gave a thought-provoking presentation on W3C Web Publications spec and how it might apply to the news publishing industry. Paul Kelly, lead of the Sports Content Working Group presented his group’s investigations into semantic modelling for sports content, looking at existing sports models and current projects investigating schema.org and semantic / linked-data modelling of sports information, which will feed in to an upcoming version of SportsML.

Tuesday: NewsML-G2, ninjs, Robojournalism, AI, Blockchain, Trust and Video

Tuesday was a busy day: we started with Dave Compton from Refinitiv, lead of the NewsML-G2 Working Group, presenting the group’s latest work including their proposal for NewsML-G2 2.29. Johan Lindgren of TT and lead of the News in JSON Working Group presented a proposal for ninjs 1.3, including many updates suggested by users and the community.

Ed Boyling of Thomson Reuters demonstrated a tool called Lynx Insights that is used by TR to generate news stories based on a rich set of rules defined by journalists. After a rule is created, an incoming news event (such as a company publishing a set of financial results) can automatically be converted to a readable story published on the wire within seconds.

Tao Chen of 500px (part of IPTC member Visual China Group) and lead of the AI Expert Group presented their latest work on AI for images, including automatic quality detection, face anonymisation, subjective feature detection (photos about “happiness” or “romance”), moving from simple face detection to age, gender and celebrity detection, automatic cutouts and more.

Angelo Marrara of ANSA and some project colleagues from EY presented their work on ANSACheck, a way of ensuring that content matches what the agency originally published using blockchain technology. The project has launched and you can see the tool embedded on ANSA’s pages.

Brendan Quinn presented IPTC’s latest work on trust and credibility in the news, including the IPTC Trust and Credibility Guidelines document draft that was published recently.

Finally, Pam Fisher of the Video Metadata Working Group presented the group’s proposal for Video Metadata Hub version 1.3, an update to clarify and simplify some points and take on some suggestions from the community.

Wednesday: NewsCodes translations, Entities, Standards Committee and IPTC Election

Wednesday started off with Jennifer Parrucci of New York Times, lead of IPTC’s NewsCodes Working Group, presenting the group’s work since the last meeting, announcing translations of the core Media Topics controlled vocabulary into Danish, Simplified Chinese and Norwegian. We now publish Media Topics in 11 languages!

Christoffer Nilsson of new IPTC member iMatrics and Joacim Ståhl of Elysium AI (part of TT) both gave presentations on their work on extracting entities (people, places, organisations and objects) from news content, and we discussed the possibility of working as a group on an industry-wide “news entities” database.

The Spring 2020 IPTC Standards Committee Meeting was led by Stéphane Guérrilot of AFP, Chair of the Standards Committee. The first part of the meeting was a wide-ranging discussion on “how to make IPTC standards easier to use”, which will lead to some interesting projects in the next few months on documentation, marketing materials, and open source software. The second part of the meeting was the formal IPTC member vote on the proposed new standard versions: we are pleased to say that ninjs 1.3, NewsML-G2 2.29 and Video Metadata Hub 1.3 were all approved!

Finally we held a General Meeting of IPTC voting Members, during which Robert Schmidt-Nia of DATAGROUP Consulting Services was elected as IPTC Chair. We also voted through a change to IPTC’s official Articles of Association, introducing a new membership category. More on this in coming weeks!

Thanks again to everyone who made our first fully virtual member meeting such a a great success!

The agenda for the IPTC Spring Meeting (May 11 – 13 2020) has been announced, featuring a focus on news automation.

Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC, says “we are very excited to host the first virtual meeting of IPTC. All members are encouraged to attend via Zoom video conferencing, and we hope that many members who find it difficult to travel to the face-to-face meetings will take the opportunity to attend the online meeting.”

Presentations and topics for discussion will include:

• Ed Boyling of Thomson Reuters will present their Lynx Insight system which blends human and machine insights for news creation. Tao Chen of 500px / Visual China Group, Lead of IPTC’s AI Expert Group will present on 500px’s work on AI stock photos. Claudia Quinonez of Bloomberg will give a presentation on “Deep Data-driven Stories”
• Presentations and discussion on metadata entities with Fredrik Lundberg of iMatrics and Joacim Ståhl from TT
• Updates from IPTC Working Group leads on the latest proposed updates to ninjs, NewsML-G2 and Video Metadata Hub, and voting on the proposals by the IPTC Standards Committee
• The latest work of the Photo Metadata Working Group, including recent work with Google on surfacing embedded copyright and licensing metadata in Google Image Search results
• A presentation from W3C Web Publications working group on the Web Publications standard
• Updates on IPTC’s recent work on the Google News Initiative project C-POP and on our work on expressing trust and credibility indicators in news content

The meeting will be held on the originally planned days — Monday 11th through to Wednesday 13th May 2020 — but will take place over five hours each day so attendees still have some time to do other work if necessary.

Attendance is free for all IPTC members. Members should sign up at the members-only registration page to be sent an invitation link.

There is still time to join IPTC to attend the meeting. If you are interested in joining IPTC, please see the join IPTC page. 

The IPTC Board was looking forward to having a meeting in Tallinn, Estonia, and hopes that we will be able to have an in-person meeting in Tallinn in coming years.

In late February we pushed the latest update to Media Topics, IPTC’s main controlled vocabulary for subject classification (also known as a taxonomy).

This release includes a translation of NewsCodes into the Danish language.

On behalf of the NewsCodes Working Group and its chair Jennifer Parruci, we would like to say thanks very much to Mette-Lene Østergaard and Mads Petersen from the Danish news agency Ritzau in Denmark for all their work on making the translation.

It’s available from all the usual places:

• The main IPTC Controlled Vocabulary server at cv.iptc.org, which includes both human- and machine-readable versions of all IPTC NewsCodes: http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/
• HTML browsable view: https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/mediatopic/treeview/
• Graphical tree view: http://show.newscodes.org/index.html?newscodes=medtop&lang=dk&startTo=Show
• Downloadable Excel version: https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/IPTC-MediaTopic-NewsCodes.xlsx

The IPTC Media Topic NewsCodes vocabulary is now available in 9 languages: Arabic, British English, Danish, French, German, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

We are working with partners on several more language translations coming very soon. If you would like to work with us on contributing a new language translation of IPTC Media Topics or any other IPTC standard, please contact us!

We were very much looking forward to our IPTC 2020 Spring Meeting in Tallinn, Estonia, beautiful city on the Baltic Sea and home city of Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC. But unfortunately, circumstances mean that we can not hold the meeting in person this time.

Instead we are looking forward to hosting IPTC’s first ever virtual Spring Meeting!

We will be going ahead with the dates that we had planned: Monday May 11 to Wednesday May 13, but rather than having all-day sessions, we will be having sessions from 13.00 to 18.00 UTC on each day.

This meeting will include:

• The usual updates from our working groups including the Photo Metadata Working Group, Video Metadata Working Group, News Architecture Working Group, NewsCodes Working Group, News in JSON Working Group, Sports Content Working Group
• Speakers from IPTC Members such as Reuters, New York Times, Bloomberg and TT on related projects in their newsrooms
• Invited guest speakers from companies related to our standards and key topics
• The special topic focus for this meeting is “robojournalism” and automated media generation
• Because we know how attendees love the networking and interaction sides of our face-to-face meetings, we will have several sessions that aim to let attendees discuss issues with each other and encourage participation in side rooms and through other channels such as our Slack community.

All IPTC Members are invited to attend. For this virtual meeting, there is no cost for IPTC members to attend.

IPTC Member Delegates should look out for an email from Brendan Quinn containing the registration link, or see the event page on the IPTC Members-Only Zone for the registration link.

We are pleased to announce that we have updated our popular Quick Guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images document to cover the planned updates to Google Image search that we announced last week.

First published in October 2018 after the announcement that Google Images displays image credits based on embedded IPTC Photo Metadata, the Quick Guide has proved very popular as a quick instruction guide showing how photographers and image owners can add the correct metadata fields to their images in a way that ensures image rights information will be displayed in Google search results pages.

Now that Google’s updates to handle “licensable images” have been announced (in beta), we have added new sections to the document so everyone can see all of the IPTC Photo Metadata fields used by Google in one place. We also make clear which fields will be used by Google straight away and which fields will only be displayed after the public launch of the new feature.

All comments and suggestions to the document are welcome. Please post to the public iptc-photometadata discussion list or use the IPTC contact form if you would like to get in touch.

We are excited to announce that the result of our latest collaboration with Google has been launched in a beta phase: Licensable Images.

This feature, that Google is exploring with this beta, will enable image owners not only to receive credit for their work but also to find ways to raise people’s awareness of licensing requirements for content found via Google Images.

By embedding IPTC Photo Metadata fields into their images (or using schema.org markup), Google will place a badge on licensable images in search results pages.

Under the image preview, Google will show embedded rights metadata (creator, copyright and credit fields). These have been displayed since IPTC’s collaboration with Google in 2018, but will now be given more prominence.

Along with the rights metadata, Google will now show links to the image’s usage licence and also a link to “Get this image”.

See the image for a mockup of how it might look.

By embedding IPTC Photo Metadata into your images, these links will be shown for images on your own website and also when your customers publish images on their sites.

Along with the photo industry organisation CEPIC, IPTC has been working with Google on this project since the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference at CEPIC Congress in June 2019.

The user-facing side of the feature is planned to launch in the next few months. Google has released some developer documentation to encourage image owners to get ready for the launch.

Learn how to make licensable images work for your image collections

For IPTC members, we will be running a webinar today, Thursday 20 February at 15:00 GMT.

The webinar will  explain how the licensable images feature works and what image owners can do to get ready for the launch.

The speakers will be Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, and Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC.

Please check your email for the announcement and information on how to join.

For non-members, we will be publishing a page on this site on Friday 21 February that will explain how to take advantage of the feature.

UPDATE: We have now updated our Quick Guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images to include information on how to embed rights and licensing metadata in your images.

We’re very pleased to see this launch. We look forward to seeing how our members will use this feature to draw more attention to the importance of image rights and licensing.

To support the work of IPTC in this and other areas, please consider joining IPTC.

Following many change requests submitted by news organisations all over the world, the IPTC News in JSON Working Group is happy to announce the 1.2 version of its standard ninjs.

The JSON Schema of the new version can be accessed at https://www.iptc.org/std/ninjs/.

We also created a ninjs User Guide that will enable new and existing users to understand how to put ninjs to use at their organisation.

Version 1.2 is backwards-compatible with version 1.0 and 1.1 and makes no breaking changes.

It includes the following new properties and structures:

• The firstcreated property goes along with the versioncreated property to specify the date/time when the first version of a news item was published.
• The charcount and wordcount properties allow the publisher to specify the total character count and word count of a news item (excluding figure captions and metadata).
• The slugline, property allows the publisher to specify a “slug”, a human-readable identifier for the item. (note that no conditions are placed on the usage of this property, usage is up to each publisher).
• The ednote, property allows publishers to specify instructions to editors.
• The infosource structure can specify one or many information sources for the news item. It is a metadata structure that can handle literal strings or values from a controlled vocabulary.
• The title property handles “A short natural-language name for the item.”

Also the following sub-properties were added:

• The value component was added to the allowed values for type to specify parts of a larger news item.
• The description of the renditions property was changed to allow for any type of rendition, not just images, and new sub-properties duration and format were added to enable audio and video renditions (for example, an audio version of a text story).

We have also included a test and validation suite so new versions of the JSON Schema can automatically be checked for compliance and backwards compatibility.

ninjs 1.2 is now included in the SchemaStore.org JSON Schema repository, to aid with editing and validation of ninjs 1.2 files in a range of popular code editors such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2013+, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and PHPStorm.

For more information, please see:

• The ninjs GitHub repository
• ninjs example documents
• The ninjs User Guide
• The ninjs 1.2 JSON Schema specification
• A new interactive tool for creating example ninjs documents – the ninjs Generator

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the News in JSON Working Group via the public ninjs discussion group, or contact IPTC via the Contact Us form.

IPTC is pleased to release a new version of its widely used Photo Metadata Standard, version 2019.1. This version introduces the exciting new feature to mark regions within an image using embedded metadata, directly in the image file.

Any existing or future IPTC Photo Metadata field can now be attached either to the image as a whole, or to an IPTC Image Region defined within the image.

“IPTC has received many requests from photographers and photo businesses for enabling them to set a region inside an image and to apply specific metadata to it, with the new version of the standard this can be done,” said Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group. “We hope IPTC Image Regions will be supported by imaging software soon.”

What can IPTC Image Regions be used for?

IPTC Image Regions can be used for many purposes:

• An IPTC Image Region can be used to recommending an area of particular interest in an image to be retained after cropping.
• A photographer or picture editor can use IPTC Image Regions to specify the area to be used if a crop of a different shape is required, such as a square cropping in a landscape shot.
• An IPTC Image Region can frame people in an image, using associated metadata from other fields in the standard attached to only that region, such as Person Shown. This opens up the possibility of news stories avoiding tired “from left to right: Jo Smith, Bill Jones, Susan Bloggs…” image captions. Now we have the ability to embed the names and details of people directly on the region relating to that person, so tools could display people’s names when a user’s pointer hovers over their faces.
• IPTC Image Regions can be used to highlight products, artworks, or locations depicted within an image.
• Another attractive feature of image regions is to identify the copyright owners of multiple photos integrated into a single composite image.
• AI systems identifying objects, text, products and people in images no longer have to include the region information in sidecar files distributed with images. Using IPTC Image Regions, the information can be embedded within the image file itself.

There are many more possible use cases. We are looking forward to seeing applications of IPTC Image Regions that we haven’t even thought of!

What shapes are supported?

According to the Specification, an IPTC Image Region can take the shape of a rectangle, a circle or for more complicated shapes, a polygon with any number of vertices may be used.

Dimensions of image regions can be specified in absolute (pixels) or relative (percentage) formats, and the Specification describes how software should retain IPTC Image Region information so that it is still meaningful after the image is cropped or transformed.

Image types and roles

To help with depicting different types of information using IPTC Image Regions, we have created two fields: Image Region Type and Image Region Role.

• Image Region Type asserts the type of content of the region, denoting whether the image region shows a person, animal, bar code, product etc.
• Image Region Role asserts what the region is used for. Examples might be to specify a recommended cropping area, a sub-image inside a composite image, the main subject to be used for cropping and focus purposes, or a region with special copyright information.

We have created controlled vocabularies that can optionally be used to populate both of these fields and we maintain them as part of the IPTC NewsCodes: Image Region Type and Image Region Role. The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group and Photo Metadata Working Groups may add terms to these vocabularies over time.

What metadata can be added to an IPTC Image Region?

In addition to Image Region Type and Role, any of the existing IPTC Photo Metadata fields can be used to describe an IPTC Image Region. Examples of fields that may be useful to attach to a region are:

• Persons Shown (for name only)
• Person Shown with Details (which supports name and also identifier such as a Wikidata or IMDB ID, controlled vocabulary entries and description)
• Organisations Featured
• Product Shown
• Artwork or Object Shown
• Location Shown (for example, a photograph of a mountain range taken from a distance)

This well organised structure of information about a region in an image can also help software makers to show the boundary of regions and associated metadata at the click of a button.

Help for users and for implementers

Users interested in exploring how IPTC Image Regions can be used can find more in a section about it in the IPTC Photo Metadata User Guide. Some examples are already available showing how an image with regions looks and how they can depict different types of information.

For implementers wanting to support IPTC Image Regions in their software tools, all definitions of the Image Region can be found in the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard specification document. The Specification includes detailed information show to express an image boundary correctly and how to include deliberately used metadata fields describing the content of a region.

Software support

Thanks to Phil Harvey, exiftool has supported IPTC Image Regions since version 11.74. The full source plus Windows and Mac OS packages can be downloaded from https://exiftool.org/.The CPAN version of exiftool does not yet support IPTC Image Regions.

We will link to other software supporting IPTC Image Regions as they become available.

Interested in more information?

• The full specification for IPTC Photo Metadata Standard 2019.1 including IPTC Image regions is available from https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata
• A more user-friendly Photo Metadata User Guidelines can be accessed at https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/userguide/
• See a demo using some example files with marked regions at https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/examples/image-region-examples/
• The controlled vocabularies for Image Region Type and Image Region Role can be accessed as part of the IPTC NewsCodes.

Questions, comments, ideas?

We welcome your ideas, thoughts and especially implementations!

Please get in touch via the contact form on this site.

At the IPTC Meeting in Ljubljana Slovenia in Autumn 2019, we welcomed several new faces to IPTC working groups, the Board and voted in a new Chair!

With so many changes happening at the same time, we thought it would be good to introduce the new faces here so members and others can get to know them all better. (All IPTC working group leads, committee leads and directors can be found on the Work Structure and About IPTC pages.)

Video Metadata Working Group lead: Pam Fisher

Pam Fisher is with IPTC as an Individual Member, and we are very happy to have her lead the Video Metadata Working Group, looking at further development and promotion of Video Metadata Hub and video technology in general.

Pam has a long history with media and video technology, working with organisations such as BAFTA, Moving Image Research and Communication Arts.

News in JSON Working Group lead: Johan Lindgren

Johan has led the Sports Content Working Group since 2016 but with the current resurgence of interest in JSON news formats, decided to move to lead the News in JSON Working Group.

Representing TT Nyhetsbyrån, Sweden’s national news agency, Johan has been active with IPTC for over 20 years, a regular meeting attendee and has been on the IPTC Board since 2016.

Sports Content Working Group lead: Paul Kelly

With Johan taking the reins of the News in JSON group, Paul is stepping (back) up to lead the Sports Content working group. Paul is also a long-time IPTC member, having been lead of the Sports Content working group from 2005 through to 2016 while he represented XML Team Solutions. Now an independent consultant, Paul has retained his ties with IPTC as an Individual Member and we are very happy to see him leading the Sports Content working group once more.

Chair of the IPTC PR Committee: Linda Burman

Linda has been an Individual Member since 2015, and has actively participated in several working groups including the Photo Metadata and Video Metadata Working Groups. We look forward to reviving the IPTC Public Relations Committee under Linda, looking at how to spread the word about the benefits of IPTC to the media industry and beyond.

New Board member: Jennifer Parrucci

Jennifer has been an IPTC delegate for the New York Times since 2015, and lead of the News Codes Working Group since 2016. Jennifer has done a great job in leading the News Codes Working Group to maintain and develop the News Codes taxonomies, particularly the Media Topics subject vocabulary. We are looking forward to Jennifer’s contributions to the future of IPTC as part of the Board.

New Board member: Paul Harman

Paul Harman has been an IPTC member for over 20 years, first with Press Association and now with Bloomberg LP. Paul worked on NewsML 1, NewsML-G2 and News in JSON (ninjs) while he was an architect with Press Association and carried it on at Bloomberg, his employer since 2014.

Paul is an active member of the News Architecture, News in JSON and News Codes working groups, and we’re very happy to welcome him to the IPTC Board of Directors.

New Chair: Robert Schmidt-Nia

Robert has been with IPTC since 2007 representing dpa, the German national news agency, where he has been Managing Director of subsidiary dpa mediatechnology since 2013.

Robert joined the board of IPTC in 2013 and has been a very active participant, so we were very happy to see him voted by the membership to become Chair of the IPTC Board of Directors.

Welcome to everyone and thanks for sharing your time, knowledge and expertise. Your fellow members appreciate it!