DMLA Newsbreak 11/9/2022

Industry News from…

Image rights information parity between IPTC and Schema.org

For the last few years, we’ve collaborated with the image licensing industry to raise awareness of licensing requirements for content found through Google Images. In 2018, we began suppoing IPTC Image Rights metadata to indicate copyright information; in February 2020 we announced a new metadata framework through Schema.org and IPTC to indicate licensable images. Since then, we’ve seen widespread adoption of this new standard by websites, image platform and agencies of all sizes. We believe this helps creators and rights holders ensure their works are attributed correctly, and helps users and the right image to use.

Today, we are happy to announce that the metadata framework supports parity between IPTC fields Creator, Credit, and Copyright and the Schema.org fields Creator, CreditText, and CopyrightNotice. This means that websites can now display image rights metadata with Schema.org (in addition to the existing IPTC metadata) as follows:

We want to thank our partners Alamy, EyeEm by Talenthouse, and TopFoto & Capture, who supported an early test of these new Schema.org fields and provided valuable feedback. With parity between formats, sites can choose the best attribution framework for their needs. For situations when a site wants to update attribution on a large volume of images, publishing the attribution through webpage schema may be easier than reprocessing images with IPTC. For situations when a site can process the image to embed IPTC data, it will ensure the attribution “lives on” in the image file, even after it is licensed and downloaded.

Please see Google’s developer page for further information.