On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 02:36:42PM -0700, Shel Belinkoff wrote: > This afternoon a friend sent me a link to his web site on which there was > an option to purchase prints. None of the photos he referenced were his, > nor did he give credit or recognition to the photographers or the artists > whose work had been photographed. I'm sure in his case it's just stupidity > and ignorance - something that I'll get around to correcting shortly. > > However, this got me to thinking about adding copyright info to a photo - > something more than the visible notice seen on so many web images. I seem > to recall that there's a way to add such information - and other info as > well - through metadata, or EXIF, or some such similar method. > Unfortunately, the book in which I read this technique is out on loan for a > week or so. Can someone quickly tell me how this info can be added to the > pic so it can't be easily stripped away? > > Thanks!
If it's added either as EXIF data, or metadata, then it's trivially easy to strip it away (for example: load image into Photoshop, then "Save for Web"). The persistent ways of adding some sort of copyright data by steganography aren't so easy to get rid of. I used to use DigiMarc on some images - they offered free watermarking for up to 100 images (although registration and web searching for unlicensed use was extra). But they dropped the free option, so I stopped using them - I just don't sell enough images to make it worthwhile. Their stuff was pretty good, though. I watermarked one of my images which was printed as the cover photograph of a local car club magazine. Scanning the cover back in produced an image which still had my digital copyright.
