schema.org is the technology used by web site owners around the world to make metadata available to search engines and other third-party services. It is widely used to embed machine-readable data in websites for products, store opening times and much more.

It is also used as one of the sources of metadata for the Google search results. The schema.org “license”, “acquireLicensePage” and “creator” properties in a page’s HTML code are used in addition to IPTC Photo Metadata embedded in image files to populate the image panel.

schema.org version 11 was released this week. It contains two new properties on the CreativeWork type (and therefore its subtypes such as ImageObject) that were created to match their equivalent properties in IPTC Photo Metadata: copyrightNotice, which matches the IPTC Photo Metadata Copyright Notice property, and creditText, which matches the IPTC Photo Metadata Credit Line property.

The new fields are not yet supported by Google images search, but hopefully will be soon.

After the recent update, the current properties mapped to schema.org and used in Google images search results are:

The IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group is working on a more comprehensive document showing all possible IPTC Photo Metadata fields with their schema.org and EXIF equivalents. The full mapping document will be released soon.