How the standard is organised
The standard has two sets of fields:
- IPTC Core holds the fields most photos need: headline, description, keywords, creator, copyright notice, credit line, city, country and usage terms.
- IPTC Extension adds more specialised fields: people shown in the image, model and property release status, location shown versus location created, licensor, digital source type and data mining permissions.
The fields can be stored in two formats. The older one, IPTC IIM (Information Interchange Model), is a binary block from the early 1990s that most software still reads. The current one is XMP, where IPTC properties sit beside other namespaces. IIM is no longer extended, so Extension fields exist only in XMP. IPTC updates the standard regularly and publishes the field list and a free reference tool on its website.
Key IPTC fields
| Group | Field | What to enter |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Headline | A short summary, often used as the title |
| Description (caption) | Who, what, where and when, in full sentences | |
| Keywords | Single words or short phrases, one per entry | |
| Creator and rights | Creator | The photographer or illustrator, as a person's name |
| Credit Line | The credit to print next to the image, as the licensor requires it | |
| Copyright Notice | For example "© 2026 Nordi AB, all rights reserved" | |
| Rights Usage Terms | The licence conditions in plain text | |
| Web Statement of Rights | A URL where the licence terms can be read | |
| Location | Sublocation, City, Province/State, Country, Country Code | Where the photo was taken, as names and an ISO country code. See geotagging |
| People and releases | Person Shown, Model Release Status, Property Release Status | Who appears, and whether signed model releases exist |
| Provenance | Digital Source Type | Whether the image is a camera capture, a composite or AI-generated |
| Data Mining | Whether the image may be used to train AI models |
IPTC metadata in day-to-day marketing work
- Agency and photographer delivery. A brand that commissions a product shoot can require every delivered file to carry the creator, copyright notice, credit line and usage terms. The terms then sit inside the file, not in an email thread, and a DAM reads them on upload.
- Partner and press distribution. When a distributor downloads a press photo, the copyright notice and credit line in the file tell them how to credit it, even after the file has been renamed or forwarded.
- AI and licensing signals. The Digital Source Type field records whether an image is AI-generated, and the Data Mining field states whether the owner allows its use for AI training. Platforms that label AI-generated images can read the first, and the second records an opt-out from AI training inside the file.
- Search engines and publishers. Some image search engines and content management systems display the creator, credit line and copyright notice taken from IPTC fields.
Common mistakes with IPTC metadata
- Putting rights in the caption. "Photo: J. Berg, web use only until 2027" in the description is invisible to software looking at Creator and Rights Usage Terms. Use the dedicated fields.
- Confusing Creator and Credit Line. The creator is the person who made the image; the credit line is what must be printed with it, which may name an agency or the brand.
- Treating the copyright notice as a licence. It states who owns the image, not who may use it or how. The licence belongs in the usage terms and in your records of usage rights.
- Broken accents in old files. IIM blocks written without a declared character set show "München" instead of "München" in software that guesses the encoding wrongly.
- Keyword lists as a substitute for a vocabulary. Photographers' keywords are free text. Map them to your own controlled vocabulary instead of relying on them for filters.
IPTC photo metadata in Freedam
- On upload, Freedam reads the IPTC title, description, keywords, creator, copyright notice, city, state and country, from IIM and from XMP, in JPEG, TIFF, PSD, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, camera RAW and video files. When a field is in both formats, the IIM value is used and XMP fills the rest.
- The description, keywords, creator and copyright notice fill the asset's own fields. The IPTC title becomes the asset title when none was set at upload, and filename parsing rules never overwrite a title IPTC has set.
- Old IIM text without a declared character set is converted from Windows-1252, so accented names arrive intact.
- Resized downloads, previews and watermarked files keep the original's copyright notice, creator, credit line, rights usage terms and web statement of rights. See the download dialog.
- Model releases and contracts are stored as attachments on the asset, and licence terms that Freedam checks on each download or share are kept in rights policies. See rights and compliance.
- Creator and copyright can be used in advanced filters and are included in the CSV metadata export.
Frequently asked questions
What is IPTC metadata used for?
To keep a photo's description, creator, copyright and licence terms inside the file, so they stay with it wherever it is copied, and so that software can read them without anyone retyping them.
How do I add IPTC metadata to a photo?
Photo editing and cataloguing applications have a metadata or file info panel with the IPTC fields. Fill in the creator, copyright notice, credit line and usage terms once as a template, then apply it to a whole shoot.
What is the difference between IPTC and EXIF?
EXIF data is written by the camera and describes how the photo was taken. IPTC fields are written by people and describe what it shows and how it may be used. The metadata entry compares them.
Related terms
See IPTC fields fill an asset
Upload a photo with an IPTC caption, keywords, creator and copyright notice to Nordi's library, then open it: the fields are already filled in.
You enter Nordi’s workspace as an administrator.