Did You Know That Social Media
Sites Strip Images of IPTC Metadata?
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Do you know the
risks of posting your organization’s photos on social media sites, or sharing
them via Dropbox and Flickr?
The
International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has announced that most social media sites do not maintain
image metadata.
The IPTC’s 2016 Social Media Sites Photo Metadata
Test, which examined 15 social media sites, revealed that most of
the sites tested stripped images of their metadata (some during display, others
on download or save as).
Let’s take a
closer look at how this news affects your brand.
Searchability
If someone on
your communications team, whether it’s a photographer (staff or freelance),
visual asset manager or marketing staff member, has taken the time to add IPTC
metadata to an image, you definitely don’t want that information to be removed.
Keywords and other
searchable fields help your team find images, whether they are searching in
your own photo library or online.
This allows your brand to track where an image has been used.
For example, Visit Greenland shares its images
for free with its stakeholders. Adding detailed metadata allows the tourism
board’s staff members to search the web for its images and confirm a photo was
produced by Visit Greenland. They can track where images have been used, and
ensure that stakeholders are following Visit Greenland’s usage rights policy.
Image Rights
IPTC tested the
social media sites to see if they displayed the 4C columns: Caption, Creator, Copyright
Notice and Creditline. Of all the sites tested, only one (Behance) got a high
score. Then, IPTC tested what happened if you downloaded or right-clicked to
“save as,” and tracked whether embedded metadata would be saved along with the
image. Again, most sites failed to make the grade, and some scores have
actually fallen since the last test in 2013.
If you’re
sharing your brand’s images on social media, you run the risk of someone
stealing those images. If image rights information is attached to the image,
you can prove the image belongs to your brand. David Riecks, leader of the
Photo Metadata Project, described another benefit of embedded
metadata after the test results were released in 2013:
Storing this
information inside the image can’t prevent others from misusing the information
but it can help others know more about the image: who is pictured in a photo,
what they are doing (and maybe why) as well as where and when it was taken.
However, all of those benefits are lost if this metadata doesn’t “stick” to the
image as it travels from one computer to another and onto the web.
Photo Sharing
If your
organization is using Dropbox or Flickr for photo sharing among your own team
or with outside stakeholders, this test shows that you run the risk of losing
valuable information in the process. Flickr does not preserve any metadata –
even Exif – when someone uses the “save as” function. Neither does Dropbox (a
decline since the test in 2013).
Corporate
visual asset management solutions like Libris have security
features like the ability to block the “save as” function, and have strict
download permissions that you can control. They preserve all metadata on
download, so your images remain searchable and maintain important contextual
information, from contextual information like caption and description to usage
rights information like copyright and license agreement. Without this
information, you run the risk of misusing the photo, which can have serious
consequences ranging from off-brand messaging to a lawsuit.
Consumer sites are not an adequate
workflow tool for organizations because they do not protect your
images.
The Takeaway
Brands are increasingly relying on imagery
to communicate. Organizations must be stewards of their own visual assets, and
make responsible decisions about the tools they use to share those assets.
Awareness is key.
“There are many
important reasons to embed and preserve metadata – to protect copyrights,
ensure proper licensing, track image use, smooth workflow, and make them
searchable on- or offline,” said Michael Steidl, Managing Director of IPTC in a
press release. “If users provide captions, dates, a copyright notice and the
creator within their images, that data shouldn’t be removed when sharing them
on social media websites without their knowledge.”
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