How to Protect Your Images with Metadata | TechnicalIllustrators.org.

There is little you can do to stop someone who is determined to steal your images. Watermarks are easily removed and website scripts are defeated with a simple screen grab. These attempts only mar your work and make your site difficult to navigate.

In this tutorial I’m not talking about protection from image thiefs, I’m talking about protection from lost opportunities. Times when your images are inevitably downloaded, blogged, cropped, reblogged, faved and saved, and end up orphaned on someone’s hard drive, ffffound, imgfave, tumblr, or email—especially when that person likes your work and would really love to hire you, if they could just figure out where the image came from.

This happens more often than you think; art directors are constantly grabbing images whenever and wherever they see them, but seldom have the time to organize them and make note of where they came from (they should really be usingEvernote). Months or even years down the road they might find your image floating in a random folder, uselessly renamedli4tceEqMb1qe.jpg by Tumblr, your name & website address croppped by an ignorant blogger leavingTinEye with no results.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could tuck your name, website and keywords and copyright information into every image to avoid this situation? You can—usingMetadata.

Metadata isdata about data—like the Created and Modified dates you see attached to every file on your computer. It’s like a little text file appended to files only adding a few bytes to the total file size. You might already be familiar withEXIF metadata added to JPGs by digital cameras, scanners and phones. The metadata I’m talking about in this tutorial isIPTC, but all you need to know is that by the end you’ll be able to embed your name, website, email, phone number, address and copyright into every image—automagically.

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