information removed (such as the creator/author field which indicates who
took the photograph, or the copyright notice field, or provider), the
service is creating potential "orphan works" of your property...."
The Controlled Vocabulary Survey regarding the Preservation of Photo
Metadata by Social Media Websites
Visit
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/socialmedia/
for survey and other links not embeded in this e-mail
Overview
Do the social media websites or other image sharing services you use
preserve your embedded photo metadata after upload? The answer to that
question isn't clear, so we are conducting a survey of various services to
find out.
Digital images, saved in the JPEG format support the embedding of photo
metadata, and most social media sites support the uploading of JPEG
images. However, many of these social media services do not preserve this
information that you have taken the time to embed in your image files. In
some instances this information is removed on upload; in other cases, it
may preserved in the original uploaded file, but any images derived from
the original may no longer retain that same information.
As a result, anyone downloading an image of yours for reference may not
know where that image came from or who to contact, without at least some
basic information stored within the image file. Based on preliminary
survey data, the amount and type of embedded photo metadata preserved in
an image online varies. Much seems to depends on the type of server side
software they use and the type of image processing they are performing
when resizing, or creating thumbnails.
Some may claim they remove this information to decrease download time for
those viewing the images. Indeed, some social media services automatically
resize your uploaded images to a smaller size, as their primary concern is
to have your images take up less disk space. Since most do not charge any
membership fees, and the service is basically free, many users don't
complain, even if they are aware.This downsizing may make sense for the
service, but not for users of their service that are interested in
protecting their intellectual property. While your images may take up
fractionally less space on their servers by intentionally removing the
embedded photo metadata and/or ICC profile, the space savings is not
justifiable if the pixel dimensions remain the same.
The real and present danger is that by having your attribution information
removed (such as the creator/author field which indicates who took the
photograph, or the copyright notice field, or provider), the service is
creating potential "orphan works" of your property. In some instances the
service may only preserve the older "legacy" form of IPTC metadata, and
thus detailed contact information will be missing in any file that may be
downloaded for later reference.
