2 comments

  1. Hi Carl,
    Thank you for this very clear article, which gives a much better understanding of the situation than what the Google article would tell.
    I would add this point, to complete your analysis:

    IMATAG, a French startup that was involved in these discussions with the IPTC and CEPIC, presented a study on the state of image metadata in 2018 :
    it shows that ONLY 3% OF THE IMAGES PUBLISHED ON THE WEB HAVE MORE METADATA OF CREDIT!
    (The full study is here: https://imatag.com/en/blog/2018/05/11/state-of-image-metadata-in-2018/)

    In fact, if you want to click on this famous button “Image Credits” in Google Image, you will have a lot of trouble because the images with IPTC credit field filled up are extremely rare.

    My conclusion is that it is now up to the WEB PUBLISHERS to follow the example of Google and UPDATE their CMS, the main responsible for the stripping of credit metadata …

    • Carl Seibert says:

      Christine,

      You are so very right. (And by the way, I have quoted your study a couple of times and will likely do so again.)

      I’m hopeful that Google’s action may start to break the terrible cycle we face now. Photographers don’t bother with metadata on the excuse that websites stip it away. Websites strip away metadata in defiance of copyright law and make that excuse that it doesn’t matter because photographers don’t bother with metadata and everybody and his dog steals stuff because – why the heck not? We’ve got to get off that merry-go-round.

      Webmasters live to please Google. So, if anything is going to motivate them to action, this should be it.

      Interestingly, we can now use Google Images to form a picture of what’s going on. I used a Getty picture of Christine Blasey Ford as an example for my next post. Google reverse image search revealed 40 instances of this picture on news sites. Of those, ONE had not stripped off the metadata! (It was a pool picture, and we can certainly assume that every member of the pool properly labeled the image before they distributed it.) One out of forty is less than 2%. Your study may have been generous. 🙂

      You are doing important work at Imatag. Keep on with it!

      -Carl

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