Hey Photographers!… Are You Meta-Smart?

With all the hooplah over copyright infringement and the looming revisions to copyright and orphan works legislation, it seems like us photographers and other producers of digital media are being backed into a very deep corner, with less and less hope for protecting our intellectual property.

But how many of you are at least utilizing metadata? Creating metadata within photoshop and tagging your image and other intellectual property will help to protect your interest in your image. To quote www.photometadata.org, “Digital photo files can include descriptive, technical and administrative classes of metadata of several types. These can list an image’s creator, copyright holder, source and description. They can explain rights released and available to an image. They can list how and when an image was created, its size, color characteristics and more.” While using metadata with your image is not a guarantee in completely protecting your copyright, it is definitely better to have the metadata in place, than not at all. In addition to helping you to protect your copyright, metadata can aid you in making money licensing your photography, smooth out workflow, track image use, and to locate your files in databases.

Take a few moments to click on over to www.photometadata.org to learn everything you wanted to know about metadata, and more. You’ll find resources on how to embed metadata into your images, make use of proper copyright practices, and answers about licensing. There is a lot of good information and other resources to help you get up to speed on making metadata work to your advantage. There are also some upcoming free getMETAsmart events scheduled in select US cities, where you will learn first-hand all the proven methods and technigues for putting metadata to work for you.

Once you register at the site, you can submit a survey about your metadata usage to help shape metadata education, and also be notified when new material is added to the site, like the Meta Tutorials. I really like this site. It’s clean, well organized, and easy to navigate. It takes the intimidation and boredom out of the equation, which we’ve all experienced whenever we delve into the deep pit of metadata and copyright practices.