After many years of working together in various areas related to media metadata, IPTC, the global technical standards body of the news media, today announces that Google LLC has joined IPTC as a Voting Member.

As a Voting Member, Google will take part in all decisions regarding IPTC standards and delegates will contribute to shaping the standards as they evolve. This important work will happen alongside IPTC’s 26 other Voting Member companies. 

“Google has worked with IPTC standards for many years, so it is great to see them join IPTC so that they can take part in shaping those standards in the future,” said Robert Schmidt-Nia of DATAGROUP, Chair of the Board of IPTC. “We look forward to working together with Google on our shared goals of making information usable and accessible.”

“Google has a long history of working with the IPTC, and we are very happy to now have joined the organization,” Anna Dickson, Product Manager at Google, said. “Joining aligns with our efforts to help provide more information and context to people online. We think this is critical to increasing trust in the digital ecosystem as AI becomes more ubiquitous.”

Google’s work together with IPTC started back in 2010 when schema.org, a joint project managed by Google on behalf of search engines, adopted IPTC’s rNews schema as the basis for schema.org’s news properties such as NewsArticle and CreativeWork. In 2016, the IPTC was a recipient of a Google News Initiative grant to develop the EXTRA rules-based metadata classification engine.

Google staff spoke at the Photo Metadata Conference (co-hosted with CEPIC) in 2018, which led to Google and the IPTC working together (along with CEPIC) on adding support for copyright, credit and licensing information in Google image search results. This has continued to include support for the Digital Source Type property which will now be used to signal content created by Generative AI engines.