A photo's copyright notice can live in three fields, and well-behaved software keeps them identical: EXIF Copyright, IPTC CopyrightNotice and XMP dc:rights. A typical value is © 2026 Jane Doe.
| Standard | Field | Where | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| EXIF | Copyright | 0x8298, IFD0 | none |
| IPTC IIM | CopyrightNotice | dataset 2:116 | 128 bytes |
| XMP | dc:rights | lang-alt | none |
[IFD0] Copyright : © 2026 Jane Doe
[IPTC] CopyrightNotice : © 2026 Jane Doe
[XMP-dc] Rights : © 2026 Jane DoeThe two-part EXIF field
EXIF Copyright has a quirk from the specification: it can hold two notices, photographer first and editor second, separated by a null byte. With only an editor notice, the photographer part is a single space. ExifTool turns the null into a newline, which its JSON output shows as \n and its plain text output as a dot:
[IFD0] Copyright : Jane Doe 2026.Northlight Studio 2026A reader that treats the field as a C string stops at the first null and never shows the second notice.
Encoding
dc:rights is language-tagged; most software reads the x-default entry. IPTC is the fussy one. Without a UTF-8 declaration, ExifTool stores © as the single Latin-1 byte A9; with -codedcharacterset=utf8 it writes the UTF-8 pair C2 A9. Readers that assume the other encoding show garbage.
WebP has no IPTC block, so only the EXIF and XMP copies can exist there.
Writing it
The metadata editor writes all three on JPEG and TIFF: EXIF Copyright under EXIF Author, and the IPTC and XMP copies together from the IPTC & XMP Rights panel. Its text fields reject commas, so type © 2026 Jane Doe rather than Copyright 2026, Jane Doe. With ExifTool:
exiftool -codedcharacterset=utf8 -EXIF:Copyright="© 2026 Jane Doe" -IPTC:CopyrightNotice="© 2026 Jane Doe" -XMP-dc:Rights="© 2026 Jane Doe" photo.jpgA notice doesn't create copyright; in the US it has been optional since March 1989. It tells people who to ask, and Google Images can display it. Removing someone else's notice is riskier than it looks: in the US, stripping copyright management information can violate 17 U.S.C. § 1202. Any full strip deletes all three fields. For the license URL that usually accompanies the notice, see Web Statement of Rights; the copyright guide and EXIF vs IPTC vs XMP go further.