2024 has flown by, but it was a great year for IPTC.

The highlight was definitely the creation of the IPTC’s first new Committee in many years – the Media Provenance Committee, with its working groups for Advocacy and Education, Best Practices and Implementation, and Governance.

Thanks to our Committee Chair Bruce MacCormack (and previous Chair Judy Parnall), and Working Group leads Helge O. Svela, Laura Ellis and Charlie Halford for all their hard work.

With the Committee we launched the Origin Verified News Publisher List this year, with demos and events at IBC in September and NAB New York in October.

The Media Provenance Summit held in the UK in October drew over 70 representatives from news organisations from Africa to Iceland to understand what we are doing in the area of C2PA and media provenance. Thanks to the BBC and Media Cluster Norway for organising the event.

The Committee’s latest milestone is the updating of its governance guidelines to make it easier for Verified News Publishers to obtain certificates. More information will be announced very soon.

Our other Working Groups under the Standards Committee have not been idle – this year has seen new versions of NewsML-G2, ninjs 3.0, Photo Metadata 2024.1, several updates to our NewsCodes vocabularies, including updates to the widely-used Digital Source Type vocabulary, and a forthcoming update to Sport Schema.

Our standards are being used by many of the biggest organisations in the world. Google uses IPTC metadata for AI transparency (among other things). Axel Springer spoke at our Autumn Meeting about how they use Video Metadata Hub to manage their Video On Demand system. AFP and Kairntech talked about how they auto-classify content using Media Topics. And many more of course!

We published advice on using IPTC Photo Metadata for AI-generated images as part of an update to the Photo Metadata User Guide – both to mark their creation and to declare the owner’s intent on whether the image should be used as part of a training data set.

Our partnerships have never been stronger. We signed new liaison agreements with CIPA, EIDR and Global Media Registry. Our latest collaboration with DPP was the Live Production Exchange project, based on IPTC’s ninjs 3.0 standard.

We submitted position papers to the IETF workshop on AI Control and to the EU’s consultation on the AI Act, making the case for respecting embedded metadata in determining whether media files can be used as training data for AI engines.

We had many new members join: Google, Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle, HAND (Human & Digital), China Association of Press Technicians, Kairntech, DW (Deutsche Welle), Factiverse, Media Cluster Norway, RNZ, John Simmons. European Broadcasting Union (upgraded to Voting Membership), and Trufo. We’re very happy to have you all onboard!

We had two amazing member meetings: one physical meeting in New York (thanks to The New York Times and The Associated Press for hosting us) and one virtual meeting in the Autumn. Our attendees especially loved the guided tours of the NYT and AP archives. We’re already planning the next Spring Meeting which will be held in Juan-les-Pins, France in May 2025.

The IPTC Photo Metadata Conference in May saw Adobe, Camera Bits, Foto Forensics, Numbers Protocol and others present many aspects of photo metadata to celebrate 20 years of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard.

We gave presentations about IPTC standards in the Netherlands, UK, Brazil, USA and France – and probably other places too!

Here’s to achieving even bigger things in 2025!

Thanks for all your help and support.