Google’s latest search update is great news for photographers, especially for those whose images are frequently reproduced without permission.
Searching for images on Google makes it all too easy to misappropriate copyrighted images and videos, often without even realizing it. However, the search giant has recently taken some much-needed steps towards respecting the rights of photographers or at least making it less easy to plead ignorance when it comes to copyright infringement.
Working in conjunction with picture industry consortium CEPIC and the digital standards body IPTC, Google is now extracting rights-related information from image files and displaying it alongside images returned from searches. You can see this information in a new ‘Image Credits’ link, provided with each image.
For now, ‘Creator’ and ‘Credit’ information is displayed as defined in the IPTC metadata standard, with the ‘Copyright Notice’ field to be added in the coming weeks.
While copyright and licensing information are often embedded within image files as metadata, this information often isn’t available to the casual observer unless manually extracted from the files. Google’s new policy, therefore, increases the visibility of such information which would otherwise go unnoticed.
Of course, none of this is helpful if images aren’t tagged with the necessary metadata in the first place, so if you want to take advantage of this feature you’ll need to make sure your images are properly tagged before you upload them.
Many advanced cameras and image editing applications such as Adobe Lightroom will allow you to supply this information once and have it applied automatically to all of your own images.
Unfortunately, there are also many applications and services which strip out IPTC information, so it’s easy for it to become lost either accidentally or deliberately by those who wish to misuse the images. However, I believe this move is a big step in the right direction for Google as it will raise awareness of image rights issues in general and potentially make it easier for people to discover the creators of images they like with just a few clicks.
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