Copyrighted 
Where IPTC comes from
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) is a consortium of news agencies and publishers. In the early 1990s it published the Information Interchange Model (IIM), a format for exchanging news, including photographs, between agencies and newspapers.
IIM organises data into numbered records and datasets, written as record:dataset. Record 2, the Application Record, holds the descriptive fields: 2:80 By-line, 2:110 Credit, 2:115 Source, 2:116 Copyright Notice, 2:120 Caption and many more. Adobe Photoshop began embedding these records in JPEG and TIFF files, and the habit spread. In a JPEG they live in an APP13 segment; in a TIFF, in tag 33723.
IIM was built for wire services, where every byte counted, which is why its fields have small fixed limits. Those limits still apply whenever software writes the IIM form today.
What the field holds
IIM defines 2:116 simply: it contains any necessary copyright notice. In practice that means the owner's name and a year, as in © 2026 Jane Smith.
- Limit: 128 bytes. The limit counts bytes, and in UTF-8 the © sign and many accented letters take two bytes each.
- Not repeatable: one notice per file. If several parties hold rights, say so in one line.
- Character set: declared separately, in dataset 1:90. When a file declares UTF-8 there, readers decode it correctly. When it declares nothing, readers guess, and a © can turn into two stray characters.
Software that respects the limit truncates longer text, so put the owner's name before anything else in the line.
Writing a good notice
A notice should answer one question: who holds the copyright? Keep it short and specific.
- Use the © sign or the word Copyright, then the year, then the owner:
© 2026 Jane Smith. - Name the owner. If a client or employer owns the rights, their name belongs here, and yours belongs in the creator field.
- Keep credit wording in the Credit Line and licensing terms in Usage Terms and the Web Statement. The notice is short by design.
- Use the same text everywhere. A notice that differs by a comma between two layers is a disagreement to any software that compares them.
Many photographers add All rights reserved. It is common and harmless, and it adds a few bytes.
IPTC Core and XMP
IIM has fixed byte limits and an awkward character-set model. In the mid-2000s the IPTC moved its fields onto XMP, as the IPTC Core schema, and later added the IPTC Extension. The Copyright Notice kept its meaning and moved to dc:rights in XMP. Today both forms are part of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, and most professional tools write both.
Formats differ in what they can carry. JPEG and TIFF have a standard home for IIM. HEIC and PNG files usually carry these fields only in XMP, so for those formats dc:rights is the IPTC notice.
Who reads it
2:116 is the field a picture desk sees first. Agency ingest systems, Photo Mechanic, Lightroom Classic's IPTC panel and Photoshop's File Info all show it. Many content management and archive systems index it for search.
Some web services remove embedded metadata when you upload, and some keep it. Behaviour changes over time, so test the platforms you use: download your own photo after posting and read it with the copyright checker.
Common mistakes
- Licence text in the notice. Long terms push past 128 bytes and get cut. Put them in Usage Terms instead.
- The agency's name instead of the owner's. Unless the agency owns the rights, it belongs in Source or the Credit Line.
- A different year in each layer.
© 2025in IPTC and© 2026in XMP is a disagreement, and some software will flag it. - An undeclared character set. A notice written in UTF-8 without dataset 1:90 can display as
©in software that assumes Latin-1. - Editing IPTC in a tool that ignores XMP. The two copies drift apart, and readers that prefer XMP never see the change.
Each of these is easy to spot when you read every layer side by side, which is what a checker is for.
Keeping it in step with EXIF and XMP
Because a notice can live in three places, it can say three different things. When the IPTC notice names you and the EXIF Copyright tag still names a former studio, readers that prefer EXIF will credit the studio.
Copyrighted writes 2:116 from your Rights Profile together with EXIF Copyright and XMP dc:rights, so every layer reads the same. For HEIC and PNG it writes EXIF and XMP, the layers those formats carry.
Questions
How long can the IPTC Copyright Notice be?
128 bytes in the IIM form. In UTF-8 a © sign uses two of them. The XMP form, dc:rights, has no such limit, but keeping both the same means staying within 128 bytes.
Is IPTC the same as XMP?
No. IPTC is the organisation and its standards; IIM is its older binary format, and IPTC Core and Extension are its fields expressed in XMP. The Copyright Notice exists in both forms: 2:116 in IIM and dc:rights in XMP.
Why does my notice show strange characters?
The IIM block probably doesn't declare its character set in dataset 1:90, so the reader guessed the wrong one. Rewriting the notice with a tool that declares UTF-8 fixes it.
