The Information Interchange Model (IIM) is a file structure and set of metadata attributes that can be applied to text, images and other media types.
IIM metadata embedded in images are often referred to as "IPTC headers", and can be easily encoded and decoded by most popular photo editing software.
In the late 1980s development began on a standard (the Information Interchange Model) that would be designed to best work with computerized news editing systems.
The XMP specification describes techniques for embedding metadata in JPEG, TIFF, JPEG2000, GIF, PNG, HTML, PostScript, PDF, SVG, Adobe Illustrator, and DNG files.
Other speakers included photographers such as David Riecks and Peter Krogh, photo and news agencies such as Reuters; representatives of standards bodies such as PLUS, IPTC, and IFRA; as well as spokespersons from the photo metadata implementers side, such as Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., Canon Inc., FotoWare AS, Hasselblad, and Microsoft.
The electronic presentations given by most of the speakers are available online from the Photo Metadata Conference website Archived 2011-05-11 at the Wayback Machine including a link to a report on each of the speakers' talks ExifTool – an open-source program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, video, and PDF metadata