Which Sites Protect Your Photos Best?  Why You Should Care

As you create and upload images to the Internet, your camera, your editing software, your tagging of information as you upload can all be associated with your photo and help people find you as the rightful owner if someone steals your image.  Unfortunately, some sites strip off the critical information which identifies the photo as yours.  

Once your image then becomes separated from you, it may get classified as an "orphan work".  The UK has passed a law which protects companies using these "orphaned works", so your photos may start appearing in many unapproved and even offensive commercial uses.

People have proposed that preserving rights information is the key to avoiding having your work "orphaned" (taken from you and used without your knowledge or permission), but that argument is weak at best.  The information associated with your photo is obviously easy to remove.  If your photo primarily appears somewhere like Facebook which is not indexed by Google Image Search, the thief of your photo will say that they performed a diligent search and claim protection under that UK law.  The new law shifts protection from the creator of the image to the unauthorized user.  Even if you were inclined to pursue a court case in the UK over the incident, your compensation will be limited to someone's definition of what the "market value" was, not the amount you would have required up front before the image was used.  

Hopefully the UK law will get overturned, not copied in other countries.  In the meantime, here's an excellent article on ways to maximize the information associate with your photos, provided that the site you upload to doesn't simply strip that information off:

Six Ways to Keep your Digital Images from Becoming “Orphan Works”
http://photometadata.blogspot.com/2013/05/six-ways-to-keep-your-digital-images-from-becoming-orphan-works.html

Fortunately the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group tested how Social Media and photo sharing sites manage metadata embedded into images which are uploaded to their sites, so you can consider where your risk is the greatest.  These are the results as of March 2013:
http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/social-media-test-results.php

The short story: at the time of that test, +Google+ was among the best sites preserving the data associated with your photos, Facebook and Flickr were among the worst.

Here's an article on what to do when you find that your image has been taken:
Has someone stolen your photo?
http://picturedefense.blogspot.com/

Photo: This photo of +Lori Hibbett was taken last night at sunset, up the hill behind our house.

Google+: Reshared 140 times
Google+: View post on Google+