IPTC Information Interchange Model
The IPTC - NAA - Standard ( often only briefly IPTC) is used to store information about image content in image files (eg TIFF or JPEG File Interchange Format ) files. It was about 1990 as Information Interchange Model ( IIM ) is defined. Information - both text and date and number values - are stored in a format defined by this standard in a specific area of the file.
Background and development
The IPTC -NAA standard developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council ( IPTC), together with the Newspaper Association of America ( NAA) and is generally suitable for all types of media, including text, photos, graphics, audio or video. The standard defines two aspects of metadata: on the one hand a list of fields and their meaning, on the other hand, a technical format to store these fields with the values entered. The standard allows About the picture rights, specify the name of the author, title or key words and also to store directly in the image file. This way of storing metadata is very common in photo agencies and picture archives. With appropriate programs ( mostly in the professional setting image databases ) is enriched in such files can easily search for specific entries or keywords. Thus, the management, maintenance and use of large image archives can be simplified.
From 2003 to store in XMP format (Extensible Metadata Platform ) is entered next to the storage in the technical format of the IPTC -NAA standards, thereby however, the fields defined in the IPTC -NAA standard have been preserved with their meaning. This is defined in the IPTC Core Metadata Photo- standard since 2004. Current products such as digiKam support both storage in the format of the IPTC -NAA standards as well as in XMP format. Some products also conduct a synchronization of the metadata values between the two formats, plus there is a comprehensive guide (Guideline ) of the Metadata Working Group.
Parameter
Character set
The IPTC - NAA - Standard writes itself has no particular character set before, but makes it possible to store data in almost any character set. The standard provides that the character set used in ( not listed above ) Envelope Record is specified 1:90. Actually, however, a considerable number of applications will ignore this field and assumes instead that the data were written in the character set used by just applying operating system, which is either the widespread Latin - 1 character set ISO / IEC 8859-1, or by Apple MacOS. A few applications even go out from one encoding in very limited ASCII character set. For the user, this results in the need to verify that the fonts are compatible with each other, which assume the programs used in each case.