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Forcing the use of IPTC tags over XMP
This topic explains how to configure Color Factory to prioritize IPTC tags over XMP ones.
04. March 2025
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Note: XMP has been the established industry standard for reading and writing embedded metadata for over two decades and we will continue our efforts to remain the industry leader in XMP capabilities adoption. As most applications and devices now exclusively use XMP as the format for reading and writing embedded metadata, we see that the additional support for reading IPTC block metadata is causing unnecessary compatibility issues. Moving forward, Fotoware will not be parsing IPTC metadata from assets if XMP metadata is present in the asset.
Support for parsing EXIF information will not be affected by this change.
Fotoware is still a member of the IPTC Committee and remains involved in the adoption of IPTC standards in our tools.
Forcing IPTC prioritization
In the Color Factory Settings app, expand the relevant channel and select Metadata.
The following options are available on the General tab.
- No option is selected (default): Use XMP unless we detect that the IPTC has been updated without updating the XMP. The IPTC is newer.
- Always use XMP and ignore IPTC: Use XMP even if IPTC seems to be newer. Only use IPTC is XMP is completely missing.
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Force IPTC preference over XMP: Use IPTC when it's found in the file.
If a file contains non-standard IPTC fields and has been opened and re-saved by Photoshop CS2 or CS3, Photoshop will ignore the non-standard IPTC fields when converting the metadata to XMP format. As a result, additional IPTC information not recognized by Photoshop will seemingly disappear from a user’s point of view. Color Factory can be configured to read the IPTC metadata block in the files regardless of the presence of an XMP block and so retain the contents of the non-standard fields as well.
This option is typically used during the process of moving an existing system over to the newer XMP standard, since at some point there will likely be a mix of IPTC and XMP compliant systems. However, once the transformation to XMP is complete, IPTC tags will be redundant and there will be little need to activate this option.