The 50 Greatest Photo Ops

In the wake of the ongoing dispute over copyright infringement between the AP and Shepard Fairey, it’s worth mentioning the importance of making ownership of your images easy to determine.

Once you put an image on the Web, you lose virtually any of control over who sees it and what they do with it. Remember, the only way for anyone to see your images online is for that image to be downloaded to their computer, usually in a temporary cache of the Web browser. So putting a notice on your site along the lines of,  ”Images may not be downloaded…” is worse than a waste of time. It’s technically impossible to be complied with by any user.

For the vast majority of photographers, this loss of control is a worthwhile tradeoff for reaching a worldwide audience. In fact, the purpose of displaying images on the Web is dissemination, pure and simple. That doesn’t mean, however, that getting your images seen means you give up any of your rights to the image. The goal is to prevent others from using your images for promotional and/or monetary gain without some form of consent and compensation.

Assuming you know better than to upload high resolution versions of your images that will render acceptable print quality, the biggest favor you can do yourself is to embed ownership and copyright information inside the images themselves. Photoshop gives you the ability to embed IPTC metadata for each and every image. Just go to File>File Info.

 

 

You can get as detailed as you like, adhering to established protocol for location, keywording, and other descriptive data. At a minimum include the name and contact info of the photographer and copyright owner, if they are not the same entity.

Lightroom makes it even easier to add this information, which can even be done at the time of image import.

Adding this metadata means that anyone who has access to your online image on a local computer can quickly and easily determine image ownership in any number of readily available software apps, even if they don’t own Photoshop or Lightroom.

Just to be clear, adding metadata doesn’t prevent someone from using your image in an unauthorized manner. But providing easy access to ownership information can make it easier for you to pursue an infringement claim. The”I didn’t know whose image it was” argument does not hold up nearly as well if ownership and copyright information stays attached to the image. Below is  what Apple’s Preview app shows for an image downloaded from a recent post of mine.

In an upcoming post I’ll look at ways to actually enter metadata quickly and efficiently in both Photoshop and Lightroom.

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This entry was posted on February 11, 2009 at 6:42 am and is filed under Instructional. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Adobe, camera, copyright, digital, Lightroom, metadata, photography, Photoshop, tutorial

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