If your camera lets you automatically add copyright EXIF metadata to every photo you take, you should do it: it could help you recover your gear if it ever gets stolen. That's exactly what happened to photographer Jon Grundy: after losing $15,000 in gear, Grundy was able to identify the thief and recover his stolen equipment after seeing his name in the copyright info of online photos.
Last week, we took a look at an excellent Photoshop alternative for Mac OS X, Affinity Photo Beta. This week, we are taking a look at a possible Lightroom alternative, Emulsion, to see if it can also help you step outside of Adobe’s ecosystem. While Adobe provides an excellent range of products, some photographers are looking to expand their horizon with more affordable alternatives.
If you shoot film, you know how difficult it can be to properly organize your photographs once they have been digitized to your computer. Modern digital cameras allow easy organization with built in metadata that provides every bit of information you could ever need; however, digitally scanned photos contain no such data. Promote Systems has introduced the Meta35, a device to easily import and sync your film camera’s metadata.
You may be stuck in a photographic rut and not even know it. To the rescue comes Lightroom Analytics, a free plugin for Adobe's Lightroom management/editing package that analyses the metadata in your library to spot trends.
When it comes to images, Pinterest is a bit of a copyright nightmare. It's not unusual for people to pin photos without any information or attribution, which inevitably leads to others using or sharing the photo without permission.
Still, you have to give the company credit, it's trying to "wake up" so to speak. In addition to a deal struck up with Flickr last year, Pinterest has just announced a new arrangement with GettyImages, in which Pinterest will pay Getty so that images from the service might be given proper MetaData.
You might not know this, but there was metadata before there was, well, metadata. Way back in 1914, Kodak introduced the Autographic system, a combination of autographic cameras and film that allowed you to permanently sign, date and title your negatives as you shot them.
How well does your favorite photo hosting and/or sharing service handle the copyright information and EXIF data of your photographs? How do the popular services stack up against one another in this regard?
Metadata handling isn't often discussed when photo sites are compared, but that's what the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has been devoting an entire study to. The organization has published its findings regarding which companies play nicely with your metadata, and which pretend it's not there.
Donalee Moulton over at The Lawyers Weekly has an article describing how EXIF data is beginning to be accepted as valuable evidence in courtrooms -- at least in Canada:
One of the big conveniences of shooting digital is that your pictures pop out with useful details baked into …
Earlier this month the US Army published an article warning its soldiers that …
EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It's useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A's, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent.
Photo Stats is a new iPhone app that can help you visualize your iPhoneography habits by automatically generating interesting infographics showing things such as where you snapped photos and the time of day you shoot the most. You can buy it for $1 in the App Store.
Want to play role in the legendary agency Magnum Photos? Well, now you can as a "Magnum Tagger". The cooperative is having a tough time keeping their large archive of historical photographs organized and easily searchable. Of the 500,000 images they've uploaded to the web, about 200,000 have little or no associated metadata.
Here’s an interesting snippet from an article published today by David Pogue of …
The most recent fuel for resentment towards BP comes from a doctored photo of the company's crisis center in Houston. America blog's John Aravosis made the connection when he examined a hi-resolution version of the photo, which was displayed prominently on the BP website. All this comes after BP promised for increased transparency between the company and the public.