Google Supports Protecting Photographers’ Pictures
One of the downsides to sharing your pictures on the web is how easy it is for them to go astray. With digital capture I’ve always said, “Easy come, easy go,” and that applies to the web as much as it does to photos on your cameras card or your computer hard drives. Thankfully, Google has promised to help change all that by helping to protect photographers’ pictures. Stray pictures across the net wouldn’t be a big deal if there were ways for people to easily track down the owner of a photo.
As part of a collaboration between Google, photo industry consortium CEPIC, and IPTC, the global technical standards body for the news media, you can now access rights-related image metadata in Google Images. That’s a huge advancement in this very important way for photographers to protect their pictures.
I will say that this capability is already available when you use software that embeds this metadata inside your images. The real problem, which Google is now committed to help stop, is the extraction of that metadata when you upload your pictures to the Internet. I’ve been suggesting for years that photographers should always include their contact info and metadata in all their pictures and copyright their work.
Thankfully many of the most used software programs allow you to include your contact info/metadata very easily. These programs include Lightroom, Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, Photo Mechanic, Nikon View, and others. Unfortunately, my favorite tool for working with my large database of over 1 million photos, Mylio, can’t do this. I’ve been pestering my friends at Mylio for complete metadata info for awhile now, and I’m confident this feature is coming. But we need it sooner rather than later.
Thank you Google for this move to help photographers get the credit they deserve and hopefully get paid.
The post Google Supports Protecting Photographers’ Pictures appeared first on Natural Exposures, Inc..