International Press Telecommunications Council
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) is a consortium of news organisations, its main function being to develop and publish industry standards. It is best-known to photographers for the widely-used IPTC Headers that can be embedded into image files to carry information (such as copyright information) about the images.
IPTC Headers
The IPTC developed and maintains the IPTC Core standard as well as both IPTC Extension, a standard to extend the set of IPTC Core fields, and the Information Interchange Model (IIM). It is the last-named, IIM, that is commonly called the IPTC Header. However, IPTC metadata can now be used within Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) framework -- and this is being implemented in the IPTC Core standard.
Other activities
Besides providing standards for attaching metadata to photographs, the IPTC provides news exchange formats to the news industry and extends its reach to other media such as audio- and video files and streams. The brand name NewsCodes refers to its controlled vocabularies (taxonomies) used for categorizing news content.
