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I have been trying to examine a JPEG file, known to contain IPTC data, but could notice no strings whatsoever. I tried the well known UNIX strings command, ASCII, 8-bit, 16-bit Unicode --- to no avail: I could not see any strings that I expect to find in IPTC fields.

My question is: How is IPTC data encoded? Is it encrypted? Compressed? Other? Why can't it be viewed using the strings command?

Not So Sharp
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    In the meanwhile, I have discovered this great tool, named [Jeffrey Fried'ls Exif Viewer](http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fscontent-cdg2-1.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-xap1%2Ft31.0-8%2Fs960x960%2F10477264_10153399188772365_4053754948302550180_o.jpg) – Not So Sharp Feb 01 '16 at 05:56
  • And [this SO thread](http://stackoverflow.com/a/30868152/1731850) as well. But I am still curious to know how the IPTC data is actually encoded into the binary image file such that it is not readily apparent from using a hex viewer. – Not So Sharp Feb 01 '16 at 06:03
  • Is http://iptc.org/standards/photo-metadata/ what you are after? Also, I would suggest another utility, ``exiv2`` from http://www.exiv2.org/ project. – mcepl Feb 01 '16 at 07:39

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The most probable reason why you cannot view IPTC data using a hex viewer is because it has no IPTC data.

An image that contains IPTC data like this one:

http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iptc.org%2Fstd%2Fphotometadata%2Fexamples%2FIPTC-PhotometadataRef-Std2014_large.jpg

has an XML structure and text fields that are view-able through a text editor like Emacs (8-bit, not even Unicode).

datps
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    Thank you. *"has an XML structure and text fields that are view-able through a text editor (8-bit, not even Unicode)."* is what I was after. Turns out that indeed no IPTC data is present in the image file I was examining. – Not So Sharp Feb 01 '16 at 18:42