The fields that say who made it, and which platforms keep them

Three standards, one file

Open any photograph in exiftool and three different metadata systems come out at once.

EXIF is the camera’s record: make, model, lens, shutter, aperture, ISO, date, orientation, and often GPS. Written by the device, rarely edited by hand.

IPTC is the press standard, defined for news agencies in the 1990s and still the one picture desks, stock libraries and image databases read. Its fields are about the picture’s meaning rather than the camera’s settings: Creator, Credit Line, Copyright Notice, Headline, Description, Keywords, City, Country.

XMP is Adobe’s container, an XML block that can carry IPTC fields, editing history, ratings and labels, and anything else a tool wants to embed. It is the one modern software actually writes, and it can live alongside the file as a sidecar .xmp for formats that cannot embed it, notably raw files.

The practical consequence: when people say “the copyright is in the file”, they usually mean an IPTC field carried inside an XMP block. Fill it in one place and most software shows it.

The four fields worth filling every time

You do not need the whole schema. Four fields carry nearly all of the value.

• Creator: your name, or the photographer’s. This is what a picture desk searches on.
• Copyright Notice: © 2026 Your Name. Its presence is what makes removal an identifiable act rather than an oversight.
• Credit Line: how you want to be named in print, which is not always the same as your legal name.
• Description: one sentence saying what the picture shows. This one earns its keep twice: it is what a database search matches, and it is the starting text for the alt attribute when the image goes on a page.

Set them once as a preset. Lightroom, darktable and digiKam all apply a metadata template on import, so every frame from every shoot carries your name without a further thought. On the command line:

exiftool -Creator="A. Photographer" -CopyrightNotice="© 2026 A. Photographer" \
  -Credit="A. Photographer" -overwrite_original *.jpg

What the platforms actually do

This is the part that decides whether any of it matters, and it is worth testing rather than assuming, because behaviour changes without announcement.

Broadly: most large social platforms re-encode uploaded images, and re-encoding rebuilds the file from decoded pixels. Whatever metadata survives is whatever the platform chose to copy across, which is usually little or none. Some keep copyright and creator fields and drop everything else. Messaging apps typically strip the lot along with a good deal of resolution.

Sites whose business is images behave differently: stock libraries, photo-sharing services aimed at photographers and most content management systems preserve IPTC because their users would revolt otherwise.

The test takes four minutes and settles the question for the platform you care about: fill the fields, upload, download the file the platform serves back, and run exiftool on it. Do this again in a year.

The conclusion to draw is not that metadata is pointless. It is that embedded metadata is a record, not a protection. It survives the file being copied, emailed, archived and re-opened in another program. It does not survive a screenshot, and it does not survive most social uploads. Cryptographically signed provenance, which is the C2PA work in module seven, is an attempt to fix exactly this gap, and it breaks at the same re-encoding step unless the platform participates.

The half that must not survive

The export lesson made the privacy point about GPS. Two more cases are worth knowing.

Orientation. EXIF has a rotation flag, and some software applies it while some ignores it. A photograph that is upright in your editor and sideways on a client’s machine is almost always this. Bake the rotation into the pixels before delivery (exiftool -Orientation=1 -n after a real rotation, or magick -auto-orient) rather than relying on every downstream reader to honour the flag.

Editing history. XMP can record the software, the edit steps, and sometimes earlier file paths, which have a habit of containing a client’s name or your own directory structure. For an external deliverable, strip everything and write back only the four fields you want:

exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -Creator -CopyrightNotice -Credit -Description \
  -ColorSpaceTags -overwrite_original out.jpg

-ColorSpaceTags is the important qualifier. A blanket -all= removes the ICC profile too, and a file with no profile is read as sRGB by everything, which is fine if you converted to sRGB, and which turns an Adobe RGB file washed out in exactly the way the export lesson described.

Today: run exiftool on the last photograph you delivered to anybody. Note what it says about your name, your location and your software. Then decide which of those you intended to send.