Parergon is a metadata editor. Its job is to put the right information into your photos and keep it there. Version 1.7.1 does more of both.
It adds 29 new fields, bringing Parergon’s built-in registry to 171 fields across EXIF, IPTC and XMP. Most of the new ones come from the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, the format that newsrooms, picture agencies, archives and museums use to describe who made a photo, what it shows and how it may be used.
Together they give Parergon every field of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard 2025.1, Core and Extension, including the PLUS licensing fields, to read, edit and write back unchanged. Parergon passes IPTC’s own interoperability test with full coverage: IPTC’s checker finds every property of its reference image in a file Parergon wrote, with none missing.
The release also closes a set of quiet data-safety gaps we found while building that coverage. They have their own post: What you save is what ends up in the file. The full list of changes is in the Parergon 1.7.1 release notes.
Why IPTC coverage matters
A photo moves through many hands. A photographer captions it, an agency licenses it, a publisher crops it, and an archive keeps it for decades.
IPTC metadata is how the facts travel with the file through each step. When an editor can’t write a field, that fact is lost at that step, and it is usually lost silently.
Coverage is not a checklist exercise. Each field Parergon can read, edit and write back unchanged is one more fact that survives the trip.
New IPTC Extension fields
Five more IPTC Extension fields now appear in the Editor tab, the Info Panel and templates:
- Digital Image GUID
- Max Available Width and Max Available Height (whole numbers only)
- Organisation Code
- Image Creator Image ID
Artwork details for museums and collections
The Artwork or Object section gains five sub-fields you can edit and use in templates:
- Creator ID
- Copyright Owner ID
- Licensor Name and Licensor ID
- Contribution Description
Circa Date Created is now a free-text field, so a value such as “ca. 1850” is kept as written, and catalog search and Compare (both Pro) show it that way too.
Pickers for IPTC codes
Three IPTC fields hold codes from IPTC’s own controlled vocabularies, the NewsCodes. Typing those codes from memory is error-prone, so each now has a picker.
Intellectual Genre offers the 51 current IPTC Genre NewsCodes. You can still type your own term, because the standard allows any vocabulary here.
Subject Code and Scene Code are now editable IPTC fields with a searchable picker. Type a code or a name and press Return, or browse the list. Each code shows with its name, for example “011800 · close-up”. Subject Code offers every IPTC Subject NewsCode down to the finest level, and searching for a subject’s name also finds the codes beneath it. Codes you have already picked carry a checkmark in the menu.
The built-in Scene and Subject vocabularies were rebuilt from IPTC’s published lists, with IPTC’s own codes and labels. Codes already in your files are not changed.
The pickers work in the Editor tab, the Info Panel, Favorites, templates and Metadata Profiles.
Repeating structures
Some IPTC fields aren’t a single value but a list of entries, where each entry has its own parts. A photo can credit several contributors, and each contributor has a name, an identifier and a role.
Parergon 1.7.1 adds the foundation for these repeating structures. It reads them entry by entry, keeps each part attached to the right entry, and writes the whole list back as one unit. A list whose entries hold data Parergon can’t write back unchanged is shown read-only, with the reason, instead of being rewritten.
You can now add, edit and remove entries as a list in the Editor tab, and templates (Pro) can set them:
- Contributor, each with a name, identifiers and roles
- Licensor, with its ID, address, phones and their types, email and URL
- Copyright Owner, Image Supplier and Image Creator, each with an ID
- Person Shown with Details: name, identifiers, description and any number of characteristics
- Product Shown: name, GTIN, identifier and description. A GTIN stays exactly as typed.
- About (CV Term) and Genre (CV Term): a controlled-vocabulary term by name, term ID, vocabulary ID and refined “about”. Genre (CV Term) is separate from Intellectual Genre.
- Registry Entry, Linked Encoded Rights Expression and Embedded Encoded Rights Expression. An embedded expression keeps its XML or JSON exactly.
The deep dive on structured IPTC explains why this needed new groundwork.
Image Regions
IPTC Image Regions mark areas inside a photo (a rectangle, a circle or a polygon) and attach metadata to each one: a name, an ID, the people and organisations shown, and what the region is for.
When a photo carries Image Regions, the Info Panel now shows how many and opens them in their own window. Every region is drawn on the image, rotated photos included.
You can draw rectangles, circles and polygons on the image, move and reshape them with the mouse or the arrow keys, and edit each region’s coordinates, ID, name, description, persons, organisations, content types and roles. Add and delete regions, then save them to the file (JPEG, TIFF and directly writable RAW such as DNG), with undo. Every image Parergon can write shows the Image Regions row, so you can also draw the first region on a photo that has none. Anything else a region carries is written back exactly, and a file whose regions hold data Parergon can’t keep stays read-only.
Long text, kept in full
IPTC fields exist in two forms inside a file: modern XMP, which has no practical length limit, and the older IPTC-IIM block, which caps many fields at a fixed number of bytes. A Title, for example, gets 64 bytes in IIM.
Parergon now keeps your full text in XMP and shortens only the legacy IIM copy, always between whole characters. A note under the field tells you when that will happen. Before, a long Creator, City, Credit Line, Headline, Description or Category could block saving, or could be cut mid-character.
Every IIM value Parergon writes is now declared as UTF-8, so a city such as Zürich is no longer turned into “Zürich”.
Date Created and Intellectual Genre now also stay in sync between XMP and IIM, and the Country Code field accepts two-letter codes such as NL as well as three-letter ones.
Exif 3.0
Exif 3.0, the latest version of the EXIF standard, added seven fields. Parergon 1.7.1 supports all of them in the editor, the Info Panel and templates:
- Image Title
- Photographer
- Image Editor
- Camera Firmware
- RAW Developing Software
- Image Editing Software
- Metadata Editing Software
They are stored in EXIF only, separate from the familiar Title and Creator fields.
Metadata Editing Software names the application that last edited a file’s metadata, and Parergon now writes itself there each time you save. It touches only that tag, never the camera’s own Software tag, and undo puts the previous value back. You can turn it off under Settings ▸ General ▸ Record Parergon as Metadata Editor.
A photo’s Image Unique ID never changes when you edit its metadata, so it stays a reliable identifier for the image itself.
Smaller improvements
- Exposure Program, Metering Mode, Flash, White Balance and other coded camera fields now offer named choices such as “Aperture-priority AE” instead of a number box.
- ISO, 35 mm focal length, Flash and several other camera fields are now also written to the XMP copy that other photo apps read.
- Aperture shows as f/1.8, the way photographers read it, instead of f/1.7799999.
- Model Release Status, Property Release Status and Minor Model Age Disclosure are now pickers with the standard PLUS terms.
- Batch Geolocation (Pro) can search for a place or address and drop the pin there.
- When another app changes the file you are looking at, Parergon shows the new values within a couple of seconds, and keeps your unsaved edits.
- Disabled buttons now look disabled, and menus across the app mark the current choice with a real checkmark.
What’s still to come
On files with two or more Location Shown, Location Created or Artwork entries, those fields are read-only in 1.7.1, so an edit can’t erase the other entries. The rest of the file stays editable. Editing several entries at once is planned for a later release.
Getting 1.7.1
Parergon 1.7.1 is a free update on the Mac App Store.
Parergon is free to download, with five metadata edits a day. The new list editors, Image Regions and the IPTC code pickers are ordinary edits that count toward them, and viewing the new fields and regions is free. Parergon Pro removes the limit and adds templates, batch editing, Keyword Workbench rules, copying metadata between files, Compare and Batch Geolocation, among other features.
