A Little Extra Protection for Your Photos

I will cover filing your images with the Copy Right Office and using Watermarks in another blog post. Today I want to spend a minute and show you another way you can help protect your images using EXIF. It stands for “Exchangeable Image File Format” and is metadata that is saved in text format and embedded in the photograph. You can quickly and easily do this in Photosho, let me show you  how.

First a few word about EXIF. I've told you what it stands for but you still might not have an idea what it is. The EXIF can store information such as photographer name, location, camera data, and copyright information. The data is stored with the image and can be viewed online or in programs such as Photoshop.

Open in Photoshop the image you would like to add information to. Click File> File Information (Alt+Shift+Ctrl+I) and you will get a pop up window that looks like this.

You can click through and add as much or as little information as you want. There is even a place close to the bottom where you can pick Copyrighted from a drop down menu and add your own Copyright Notice. I add my website next to Copyright Info URL.

When you have added all the information you want to, click OK and then save your file as you normally would. Your image won't look any different but you will notice a small © in the image header next to the file name.

You can check the EXIF info on any image online or on your pc using this free EXIF viewer. http://regex.info/exif.cgi.  Just use the images url or search for a file on your computer. Feel free to use the image below to test the free viewer. Just click on it and copy and paste the url into the Image URL section of the Regex website.