Standards: IPTC Core & Extensions

In 2005, the International Press and Telecommunications Council released an updated standard for using IPTC data within Adobe's XMP schema, dubbed the “IPTC Core.” This enables IPTC data to be incorporated (via XMP) into a wider range of image formats, such as JPEG, TIFF, JPEG2000, DNG and more.

Since XMP supports Unicode text, it can represent non-Roman alphabets (such as Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese). It also solves the issue of diacritical characters getting garbled when moving images between Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Unlike the legacy format, IPTC Core does not have specific character limits for each field, except for maintaining backward compatibility with the original IPTC schema.

This format, initially named IPTC4XMP, after its working group’s moniker, stores information separately from the IIM form of IPTC metadata. But it shares many fields, and they are largely backward compatible. The IPTC Core Schema for XMP comprises the fields included in the IPTC Contact, Image, Content and Status panels that appear within the File>File Info menu item in Adobe Photoshop.

When you first open the File Info panel in recent versions of Photoshop, you see the built-in Description panel. The IPTC Core Custom Panels appear along the left-hand side (Photoshop CS through CS3), or along the top (Photoshop CS4) as one of several choices.

IPTC Official Website: http://www.iptc.org/

IPTC Core (IPTC Metadata for XMP): http://www.iptc.org/IPTC4XMP/