Last Thursday, the photo metadata industry came together for the 2026 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference. Over 250 registrants from well over 100 organisations gathered for the premier event for photo and image metadata experts from the media, visual arts and cultural heritage industries.

This year we focussed on the industry’s implementation of recent legislation around AI transparency and content provenance, tracking real-world adoption of content transparency technologies by AI engines, news sites, software and services.

Alexios Mantzarlis of Indicator Media gave a great overview of AI platforms’ readiness to comply with recent and emerging legislation around the world, including the California AI Transparency Act and the EU AI Act.
Held almost every year since 2007 and with around 200 attendees each year, in recent years we have welcomed speakers from Adobe, Getty Images, C2PA, Camera Bits, FotoForensics, Microsoft, the BBC, CBC / Radio-Canada, the Smithsonian and more.

David Riecks, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, talked through through the group’s recent work, including some of the proposals for updates to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard being proposed to the Standards Committee in a few weeks at the IPTC Autumn Meeting. Some of those changes include updates to handle cultural preservation metadata, which was presented by Ottar A.B.Anderson of the Digital Object Authenticity Working Group (DOAWG).

Next, Brendan Quinn took us through the IPTC’s recent work on creating best-practice guidelines for implementing C2PA in the news and media industries, including the use of CAWG Identity Assertions, metadata best practices and IPTC’s forthcoming best practices book.

Then we had a first-of-a-kind session for the PHoto Metadata Conference, a “metadata safari” where we saw vendor implementations of industry standards “in the wild”. Cindy Han of Trufo, James Lockman of Adobe, Erik Svilich of Encypher, Dennis Walker of Camera Bits and Øystein Syversen of Fotoware each had a struct-enforced 10 minutes to present their tool and show how it made use of industry metadata standards (mostly IPTC and C2PA) to help users with their photo and imaging workflows.

Lastly, Brendan Quinn appeared again to introduce Metawatch, IPTC’s new public service that monitors real-world usage of metadata in images across the global news industry, tracking IPTC/XMP, C2PA, AI opt-outs and more.

Video recordings of all sessions are publicly available via the 2026 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference event page.