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| Photographers who license their images for assignment or as stock photography typically embed their copyright and contact information in their images. There are two very good reasons for this, one is to make it easy for a potential image buyer to contact the photographer to license the image and the other is to protect the image from becoming an orphan. "Orphan works" are copyrighted works whose owners may be impossible to identify and locate. |
PHP functions for resizing jpeg images with metadata intact.Resizing with GD Many widely distributed PHP scripts for image galleries resize images with GD. These scripts frequently strip the metadata from the resized images. Here are a few simple functions that can be added to PHP scripts using GD for image resizing to maintain metadata.There are some limitations to what can be done with GD. These functions maintain data within the International Press Telecommunications Councils Information Interchange Model metadata schema and stored in Jpegs using the Image Resource Block. (IPTC IIM IRB). The use of these IPTC IIM (IRB) type headers to store text info is much better than no metadata at all. If you get confused as to how the field labels match up with your choice of metadata editor, you might find the IPTC_mapped_fields.pdf document useful. So, if you are using GD to resize and/or provide a watermark, then you have to rely on that form of metadata. It doesn't have the full creator contact info, and rights usage terms, but can get the more important fields like caption, copyright, and you can put rights usage info or additional contact info into the special instructions field. I offer these functions as a simple, effective way to modify your PHP scripts without losing your mind and writing thousands of lines of code. They make use of the PHP functions iptcparse and iptcembed. They are not fancy but they work. While these functions are very short and simple, they are something that needs to be implemented by a web programmer. If you don't have a good grasp of PHP you will need to hire a programmer that does. This is not a do-it-yourself for website dummies thing. Live Example | Download |
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How to prevent your images from becoming orphans on the web.
#1. Add a Watermark Watermarks showing your name and/or name and copyright are an excellent way to make sure that others know where the image came from without any additional work on their part. #2. Embed Metadata Embedded metadata should be done in such a way that whomever accesses the image looking for metadata can easily find it. Be sure to include your copyright, name, website and contact info to keep your images from becoming orphans. Video Tutorial How to Create a Metadata Template in Photoshop How to Read Metadata Online Here are some free programs that allow you to read metadata in images on the web. Jeffrey Friedl's online metadata viewer. http://regex.info/exif.cgi Opanda IEXIF 2 freeware viewer http://www.opanda.com/en/iexif/index.html Firefox Add-on: Exif Viewer 1.40 by Alan Raskin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3905 XMP metadata extractor (Jpeg only) http://www.dphoto.us/convert/ Useful Links Learn more about metadata, orphan works and other related topics. Stock Artists Alliance Photo Metadata Project http://www.stockartistsalliance.org/photometadata-project Stock Artists Alliance Metadata Manifesto http://metadatamanifesto.blogspot.com/ SAA on Orphan Works http://orphanworks.blogspot.com/ US Copyright Office Orphan Works http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/ IPTC Standards Photo Metadata White Paper 2007 IPTCInfo Perl module - another metadata code solution http://search.cpan.org/~jcarter/Image-IPTCInfo-1.95/ PHP.net - documentation, tutorials and examples for PHP scripting http://www.php.net |