Originally conceived for author-generated description of Web resources, it has attracted the attention of formal resource description communities such as museums, libraries, government agencies, and commercial organizations. There are several strategies for making images available but inhibiting copying. One is to scan them in at a low resolution and make those available. Another is to process them in some way, such as putting a stripe through them or a watermark over them. A third option is to superimpose the copyright information over the top of them.
Users can also create separate databases if necessary.
The Clients can search across them if they are on a single server. The JAVA Client requires the JAVA 1.2 plug-in, which is currently not available for the Mac. The HTML Client runs on a Mac or any machine that uses the current Web browsers. This allows rich metadata for the collection. This allows batch import of existing image collections and export of selected subsets of images.