IPTC and XMP: the metadata layers you've never heard of

Most privacy conversations about image metadata start and end with EXIF. Understandably — EXIF carries your GPS coordinates, which is the thing most people actually care about. But there are two other metadata layers sitting inside your image files, and they're worth understanding separately: IPTC and XMP.

They store different things, they come from different histories, and they're written and read by different software. Here's what you need to know about each.

IPTC: the metadata standard that predates the internet

IPTC stands for the International Press Telecommunications Council — a standards body that represents major news agencies. In the 1990s, before digital cameras were common, news organizations needed a way to embed caption and credit information directly into wire photos so the context traveled with the image file.

What they designed is called the IPTC-IIM standard (IIM = Information Interchange Model), and it's the layer photo editing software calls "IPTC data" or sometimes "File Info." A few fields that commonly appear:

• Caption/Abstract — the human-written description of what's in the photo
• Byline — the photographer's name
• Credit — who to attribute the image to (often an agency, not the same as the photographer)
• Copyright Notice — a string like "© 2024 Jane Smith. All rights reserved."
• Keywords — a list of tags describing the content
• City, State/Province, Country — where the photo was taken, as text entered by a human
• Headline — a short editorial title
• Source — the original source publication or wire service
• Special Instructions — editorial notes like "embargoed until 8am"

If you've ever used Lightroom, Bridge, or Capture One to add keywords or copyright info to your photos, you've written IPTC data. It's the metadata that professional photographers and stock agencies rely on to keep their libraries organized and their credits attached.

For most personal photos, IPTC is empty. But once you or anyone else has opened the file in professional editing software, it may not be.

XMP: Adobe's extensible version of the same idea

In 2001, Adobe introduced XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) as a more modern, more flexible replacement for IPTC-IIM. XMP is based on XML and designed to be extensible — meaning any application can define its own namespace of metadata fields without breaking anything.

You can think of XMP as "IPTC, but with the ability to add arbitrary extra fields." And because it's XML, it's human-readable if you open the raw file in a text editor.

XMP stores much of the same editorial information as IPTC — title, description, creator, copyright, keywords — but adds quite a bit more:

• Edit history — Lightroom and Photoshop write the entire editing history into XMP. This includes what adjustments were made, when, and in some cases with what software version.
• Rating and color labels — the stars and flags you assign in photo management software
• Face regions — where faces are in the image (written by Apple Photos, Google Photos, Lightroom)
• GPS — XMP can carry location data just like EXIF does
• Camera raw settings — if you shot RAW and edited it, the develop settings are in here
• Derived-from relationships — which original file this was derived from
• Creator contact info — email, phone, website, address of the photographer, if they've filled it in

That last one catches people. If you're a photographer who set up a Lightroom template that auto-fills your contact details — address, phone number, email — those fields get written into every file that template touches.

Where they live inside the file

Both IPTC and XMP are embedded inside the image file, not in a sidecar. In a JPEG:

• IPTC-IIM lives in the APP13 segment, preceded by the marker Photoshop 3.0.
• XMP lives in the APP1 segment as a block of UTF-8 XML, starting with the string http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/.

The APP1 segment is shared with EXIF — EXIF and XMP coexist there, with EXIF identified by the Exif\0\0 prefix and XMP by the namespace string.

In PNG, XMP is stored as a text chunk with the keyword XML:com.adobe.xmp. In WebP, it's in a dedicated XMP chunk.

If you want to look at this yourself, exiftool -G1 your-image.jpg prints every field with its source group, so you can see which fields are EXIF, which are IPTC, and which are XMP.

The practical privacy concerns

For everyday personal photos taken on a phone and never opened in editing software, IPTC and XMP are usually empty or minimal. The cases to know about:

Professional or semi-professional photographers who use Lightroom, Capture One, or Bridge have likely added IPTC/XMP data — particularly if they've set up export presets that auto-embed credit, copyright, or contact information. If you send a client a photo file, that data goes with it.

AI-generated images are a significant case. Tools like Stable Diffusion write the generation parameters (model name, prompt, seed, sampling steps) directly into the PNG metadata, and they use XMP-style chunks to do it. More on this in a separate post.

Scanned documents and screenshots sometimes pick up editor metadata if they pass through editing software before being shared.

Stock photo exports are almost always heavily tagged — agencies rely on IPTC keywords for search, so images from any stock library are likely full of author, credit, and keyword fields.

One metadata standard to rule them all?

Not quite. EXIF, IPTC, and XMP can all exist in the same file simultaneously, and they can contain conflicting information. If the EXIF DateTimeOriginal says 2019 and the XMP xmp:CreateDate says 2024, those are genuinely different fields and a viewer might show either one depending on what it's reading.

This overlap was a known problem, which is why the IPTC eventually released a mapping standard that defines which EXIF, IPTC, and XMP fields correspond to the same concept. But in practice, software writes what it writes and there's no enforcement of consistency.

The upshot: when you're removing metadata for privacy, stripping only EXIF leaves IPTC and XMP intact. A tool that claims to remove metadata should be removing all three layers. CleanImages strips all of them in a single pass — which is what "EXIF, IPTC & XMP" means in the list of what we remove.