john bishop images | fine art photography | vancouver, bc

feel free to use my images!

  copyright, EXIF, IPTC, meta-data, usage rights

There is always a risk when you put your creative work up on a web page. It is very easy for someone to download a copy of that work (in my case, images) and use it without your permission. Here’s a few things that you can do to help protect your images;

1. ensure the images are not too large (less than 400×600),
2. use a low resolution (I recommend 96 or 72dpi),
3. use the JPEG format with a slightly lossy compression,
4. always put some mark on the images indicating your ownership,
5. ensure the images IPTC meta-data for copyright and rights usage terms are set.

Both Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom allow you set IPTC meta-data. I strongly recommend you look into this as it the first step in ensuring your images are protected. In Photoshop, open an image (usually a JPEG) then first click on File then on File Info…; from there click on the IPTC fields in the left panel. In the Lightroom‘s Library module, click on the IPTC Meta-data panel and scroll down to the Contact and Copyright segments. When you Export from Lightroom, make sure the Minimize Embedded Metadata is not checked. I’ll be posting more information about this as well as copyrights and licensing soon, but you can also have a look at my discussion of the creative commons.

This is an example of a typical free-to-use image from my site and blog; if you save this image on your system, open it in Photoshop and click on File Info… you will not only see all the IPTC meta-data (copyright and usage details, my contact information, my website address, etc.) you’ll see the camera’s EXIF data (camera and lens names, aperture setting, exposure program, metering mode, ƒ/stop, shutter speed, date and time, etc.) and much more.

Drop me a note if you would like to purchase an unmarked, licensed high-resolution image (4672×3104 at 240dpi, AdobeRGB color space, approximately 41.5Mb image data) suitable for post-processing or printing. To see a sample high-resolution image, click here. All the EXIF and IPTC meta-data I mention above is also embedded in this image.

Thanks!