diaspora/diaspora — Issue #2531: Render picture credits from EXIF metadata
Author: pixelistik
Created: 2011-12-18 18:57:11+00:00
State: open

Many people are concerned about their images being properly credited to them and being spread under the right license. They often resort to putting a copyright notice right into the image, as hardcoded pixel data. This is mostly ugly and I would consider it a bad solution.

It is possible to document authorship and copyright license in the image's metadata, using the [EXIF fields](http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/EXIF.html) `artist` and `copyright`. However, this information is not apparent to the user, except the image is downloaded and examined with some software. Thus it is probably not seen as a sufficient solution. But from a logical point of view, metadata is absolutely the right place for this kind of semantic information.

D* could make a change here, if we would display the information from these two fields whenever an image is embedded in a stream, be it in a caption below the image, or in some kind of hover overlay.

This way, pictures would always be credited properly, even if they are hotlinked from some other post. This is exactly the effect that people want to achieve with pixel copyright notices.

## Feature suggestion

* D* should aim at correct image metadata
* Now: Keep EXIF tags in images throughout the processing and resizing of uploaded images
* Later: Even encourage users and provide an interface to add this information if not present at upload
* Artist and copyright information embedded in pictures should be shown to the user in some nice way