If you download this image, you should be able to see that it has metadata.Home > Essays > Fill Out Image File Metadata
If you download this image, you should be able to see that it has metadata.A burglar can get past a locked door. That's no reason to stop locking your doors. "Most people respect a locked door," music engraver Bill Holab explains.
Likewise, intellectual property thieves can get past any digital rights management (DRM) protocols you place on your image files or audio files or other original content files you create.
The most basic element of DRM is metadata, which is just information on who owns the rights to the file. As such, it's more like a sign that says "Keep Out" than a locked door. Still, it's a good thing to have if you ever need to prove your original authorship.
But most painters and even a lot of photographers don't know anything about metadata, much less EXIF, IPTC, etc. One painter who sent me a file for this website actually had the copyright status in the metadata set to "Public Domain"!
Given that the painting pictured in the JPEG he sent me has a price tag of a few thousand dollars, it would be a very good idea for the image file to have some sort of copyright information on it.
To my knowledge, Adobe Photoshop (and also Adobe Photoshop Elements) has always had a File Info dialog box in which you can fill in various fields of metadata pertaining to your image file. It looks roughly like this HTML mock-up that you can play around with:
This mock-up has "Copyrighted" as the default Copyright Status. The real thing has "Unknown" as the default Copyright Status.
Actually, this mock-up is only of the General tab in the File Info dialog box. There are many other tabs, most of which you don't need to worry too much about.
The important thing is to fill out as much as you can on the General tab. Adobe will take care to duplicate to the other tabs the fields that make sense to copy.
If you don't have any Adobe programs, there are still other ways to enter metadata on your image files. I will explain how to do it in Windows (later on I'll add info about Mac OS X; I might even have something about Linux).
In the Windows Explorer of Microsoft Windows (which is equivalent to the Finder on Mac OS X), you can right-click on a file to bring up a contextual menu. The last item on that contextual menu should be Properties. Click it to bring up a dialog box with three tabs (General, Security and Details).
Here we want the Details tab, which shows a list of key and value pairs for properties grouped under the following headings: Description, Origin, Image (gives details like pixel dimensions), Camera (gives details like F-stop and exposure time), Advanced Photo (more camera details) and File (which duplicates a lot of the information from the General tab).
You can click on any Value field and type in the necessary information. I'd only worry about Title, Subject, Tags and Comments under the Description heading, and Authors and Copyright under the Origin heading.
You can also go through each field and press Delete to remove the information there. Or, more easily, you can click on "Remove Properties and Personal Information" to remove the information much more quickly.
These instructions apply to any version of Windows that you can realistically expect to come across these days: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10, etc.
It's easy to remove image metadata. But most image thieves don't know about metadata, just like a lot of artists don't either.
So if you see your image used on some website without your permission, download the file and look at its metadata. You might find that it has your copyright information on it because the thief neglected to remove it.
Of course this assumes you filled in your copyright information in the first place.