What is libiptcdata?
libiptcdata is a library, written in C, for manipulating the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) metadata stored within multimedia files such as images. This metadata can include captions and keywords, often used by popular photo management applications. The library provides routines for parsing, viewing, modifying, and saving this metadata. The library is licensed under the GNU Library General Public License (GNU LGPL). The libiptcdata package also includes a command-line utility, iptc, for editing IPTC data in JPEG files, as well as Python bindings.
The library implements the IPTC Information Interchange Model according to its specification. For information on how to use the libiptcdata API, see the documentation. The library is written in portable C and should compile on any platform. It has been tested under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
The author of libiptcdata is David Moore. The code itself was inspired by the libexif library written by Lutz Müller. Together, libexif and libiptcdata provide a complete metadata solution for image files under Linux and other OSs.
News
June 5, 2009, Version 1.0.4 Download
- Added Italian translation from Milo Casagrande.
- Fixed multilib conflict from documentation in -devel rpm
March 24, 2009, Version 1.0.3 Download
- Fix for python saving so it does not fail when /tmp is a different filesystem. From Chris Mayo.
- Fix python crash on unknown datasets. From Ian Wienand.
- Clean up iptc_dataset_dump output. From Roger Håkansson.
- Added German translation by Chris Leick.
May 15, 2007, Version 1.0.2 Download
- Compatibility improvements for Picasa: The IPTC version and encoding are no longer stored by default in saved IPTC output because these fields confuse Picasa. Also, the APP13 data block is stored closer to the beginning of the file.
- Minor Python compile fix from Ian Wienand.
March 23, 2007, Version 1.0.1 Download
- Fixed buffer overflow in Python bindings.
- Fixed build on systems without Python.
March 21, 2007, Version 1.0.0 Download
- Python bindings now included with libiptcdata, thanks to Ian Wienand.
- A few minor bugfixes for the build process and Windows.
- The API of libiptcdata seems stable since it has lasted many months without modification. As a result, I am happy to annouce version 1.0.0!
March 27, 2006
- Loïc Brarda has added support for libiptcdata to KDE's kfile, enabling many KDE applications to automatically make use of IPTC metadata.
September 29, 2005, Version 0.2.1 Download
Library changes:- Added function iptc_data_set_version() to make it easy to set the version number of the IPTC IIM spec being used.
- Added new convenience functions iptc_data_add_dataset_with_value() and iptc_data_add_dataset_with_contents().
- New capability to modify/delete/print specific datasets when more than one of the same type exists, by appending the number to the end of the tag name. For example, "Keywords:1" or "2:25:1" refer to keyword tag number 1 (the 2nd keyword tag).
- New capability to modify/delete/print all datasets of a specific type when more than one exists. For example, "Keywords:all" or "2:25:all" will execute the operation on all keyword tags.
- Dataset numbers (for duplicates) are now printed when the IPTC contents are displayed to the user.
- Changed the semantics of the program's return value: Success whenever at least one operation succeeds and failure if no operation succeeds.
- Whenever a file is saved, datasets are now sorted by default unless the --no-sort option is specified.
- Mac OS X compile fixes.
September 7, 2005, Version 0.2.0 Download
Library changes:- Improved internationalization support, including helper functions iptc_data_get_encoding() and iptc_data_set_encoding_utf8().
- Added iptc_data_sort() and iptc_dataset_copy() functions.
- Mac OS X compile fixes.
- Fixed compile warnings with gcc 4.0.
- Improved internationalization support.
- --modify command will create dataset if not already present.
- Allows running on multiple files at once.
- Added -l (list tags), -L (tag information), and -s (sort datasets) options
- Improved handling of data sets containing more than 256 bytes
May 31, 2005, Version 0.1.2 Download
- Added new Visual Studio project and changes necessary to build libiptcdata in Windows. Contributed by Luka Renko.
- Be more tolerant of JPEG headers in unexpected orderings.
- Improved handling of datasets with zero-length data.
March 11, 2005
- I have written a patch to gthumb, a GNOME photo management application, to support storing jpeg comments and categories within image files using libiptcdata. The patch can be downloaded from GNOME bugzilla.
March 7, 2005, Version 0.1.1 Download
- Added date/time manipulation functions iptc_dataset_get_date(), iptc_dataset_get_time(), iptc_dataset_set_date(), and iptc_dataset_set_time().
- Fixed parsing error for some jpeg files.
March 1, 2005, Version 0.1.0 Download
- First release