I am developing sites which include uploading of images from photographers, illustrators and artists. I have noticed that all image meta data is removed from the images therefore not respecting the copyright of the owners. This is an important issue for my clients (and myself since I am also a photographer).

Does anyone how what, if anything, I can do to prevent this from being stripped out.

The images can also be copied easily, this is something that can be addressed with watermarks but since the image/file name is also changed there is no longer any other reference to who, what, where, when the image was created.

Anyone else have this issue to solve or have solved?

Thanks

Hello Alex,

You can use the image's caption and credit fields to display the copyright and photographer.

Krikor Boghossian wrote: You can use the image's caption and credit fields to display the copyright and photographer.

Hi Krikor

Thanks I have already done that but this does not do the same thing. IPTC tags (or metadata) is digital information that is embedded in the image itself. It contains far more information than copyright information such as where it was taken, when, photographers full details, technical information of the camera, keywords and a description plus much much more. When someone opens this image in software such as Photoshop the user will immediately see a (c) symbol in the file name and by viewing info will then be able to all related metadata. This can be very useful to editors who may be using the images as comps before asking for the license to use it.

It is easy to take images from a website using K2 and without any of this metadata the the person downloading will not have this information saved along with the image. Once they forward it to someone else (even though this in itself is arguably illegal) that new recipient then has an image with no idea of it's origin or copyright status.

Metadata in images is now a standard industry practice, wildly accepted and yet K2 strips it out. If there is no way to prevent this then K2 is not for me or any other creative person not wishing there images to be stolen, or at least to give people the excuse to say they had no idea they were copyrighted etc etc.

The only other solution, which is not very pretty, is to watermark them all, before uploading so that K2 includes the watermark in all the various sized thumbnails.

Anyone know a way to upload iages to K2 items without loosing metadata?

Fotis Evangelou wrote: I will make sure we'll investigate further in K2 v3 (stable release will be out early October) if we can maintain this metadata (I'm sure there is some workaround). This is because K2 v3 contains a better image resizing function which provides more control over the processed image.

Excellent. I look forward to the new release in October, thanks.