Metawatch

Metawatch tracks how often major news publishers preserve embedded photo metadata (Exif, IPTC Photo Metadata (in both original IIM format and newer XMP format), and C2PA) on the images they publish. We crawl a curated list of publishers monthly and score the photographs they serve.

Latest run2026-08-01 Sites crawled445 Countries122
Images analysed6,680
Mean IPTC score6
% with any IPTC10.8% % with C2PA0.12%

Trends across runs

Each point is one crawl run. See the dataset page for the underlying parquet files.

Mean IPTC score

0.025.050.075.0100.02026-05-192026-06-032026-06-152026-07-012026-08-016.96.25.45.56.0Score (0–100)

% of images with any IPTC

0.0%25.0%50.0%75.0%100.0%2026-05-192026-06-032026-06-152026-07-012026-08-0111.8%11.2%11.9%11.4%10.8%% with IPTC

Top sites

Ranked by mean IPTC score across all sampled images in the latest crawl.

#SiteCountryCategoryImages% with IPTCScore
1 500px ISO Canada newspaper 9 100% 100.0
2 Associated Press United States news agency 10 100% 97.5
3 taz Germany newspaper 20 100% 95.0
4 Süddeutsche Zeitung Germany newspaper 15 93.3% 88.3
5 Les Echos France newspaper 20 90% 83.8
6 Japan Today Japan newspaper 20 80% 76.3
7 PBS NewsHour United States broadcaster 20 90% 73.8
8 The Japan Times Japan newspaper 20 85% 71.3
9 NPR United States broadcaster 9 77.8% 66.7
10 Le Figaro France newspaper 20 95% 66.3

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Top countries

Country mean is the average of site scores, equal-weighted per site.

#CountrySitesMean score
1 Guatemala 2 28.1
2 Germany 19 19.4
3 France 13 18.1
4 United States 27 17.1
5 Netherlands 4 14.7
6 Sweden 5 14.4
7 Latvia 3 13.8
8 Canada 8 13.3
9 Portugal 6 13.3
10 Norway 6 13.1

See all countries →