Read Only Metadata?

[bsnead]

Hi all,

I trolled around a bit to see if this was discussed at all in earlier posts.  Didn't see anything, but my apologies if this has been covered before.

Is there a way to make the metadata embedded via PM be read-only?  I find that when my images are repurposed by others for web use, etc, the IPTC is stripped out, making subsequent image ID all but impossible via IPTC metadata.

If not PM, is there anyway to embed IPTC as read-only?

Thanks
~Bill

[Kirk Baker]

Bill,

I trolled around a bit to see if this was discussed at all in earlier posts.  Didn't see anything, but my apologies if this has been covered before.

Is there a way to make the metadata embedded via PM be read-only?  I find that when my images are repurposed by others for web use, etc, the IPTC is stripped out, making subsequent image ID all but impossible via IPTC metadata.

If not PM, is there anyway to embed IPTC as read-only?

That is unfortunately quite impossible.  You see all it takes is opening up the image in something like Photoshop, selecting the entire image, Copy, New, Paste, Save as...

The image is copied, but none of the metadata is copied to the 'new' image.

That is so easy to do, and there is nothing that can be done about it.  Even if Photoshop were to disallow copying of pixel data on copyrighted images, there are hundreds of other image editing applications that won't likely disallow the copying of pixels.  And it only takes one editing application to cause this issue.

-Kirk

[Juerg]

Hi Bill,

Hi all,

I trolled around a bit to see if this was discussed at all in earlier posts.  Didn't see anything, but my apologies if this has been covered before.

Is there a way to make the metadata embedded via PM be read-only?  I find that when my images are repurposed by others for web use, etc, the IPTC is stripped out, making subsequent image ID all but impossible via IPTC metadata.

If not PM, is there anyway to embed IPTC as read-only?

Thanks
~Bill

I believe there is a program (or service) that allowes you to put a watermark into the images that cannot be removed afterwards. I believe the name is something like Digimarc (or similar) and I guess there is even some information in Photoshop about it. I don't think you can protect metadata with this and I'm not sure how exactly it works, but it's perhaps worth to look into.

Regards,
Archer