Outside Shooting

Is EXIF an important issue to you? If not you won’t get much from this. On the other hand if you are considering selling your images online this could give you an option for uploading.

Let’s say you are about to send some photos to a website. If your upload is to a social networking site (SNS) it’s a simple ‘Save for Web’ command and its gone. You don’t care if EXIF data attaches itself to the file or not. The photos are only for sharing. The trouble is we tend to get into a habit of uploading because of habit.

And if you are sending files to an online gallery for sale or to your agent for rights managed images, or even a gallery in which you simply want to hold while adding more images for future use and you have the settings available to anyone you don’t know, EXIF is crucial. And ‘Save for We’b is not the choice you want since it has parameters for stripping out all of the metadata in order to make the upload quick. This is when you will be using the ‘Save As’ command in Photoshop (my apology to users of other photo editing applications – I don’t know them). The idea behind saving all of the EXIF data is important as it identifies this particular image file with your camera body and lens, your name, your © info and all other important metadata which accompanies a work for sale. Not including this can make it very difficult, though not impossible, to claim rights to the image.

Is there a way around this? Yes there is, but it means you have to have the last version CS3 or the latest version CS4 of Photoshop, because in those versions there is an option for enabling ‘EXIF Embedding’ while using the option ‘Save for Web’. However like anything you do have to remember to set this after downloading. I don’t know about you but that happens to me more than I care to admit.

But lest you think that buying copies of used Photoshop is the way to go, remember that the seller must have an Adobe Transfer of License. This way you’ll be able to participate in any upgrades which are not still in that seller’s name. Otherwise when you seek an update you will be informed that you are not the legal owner. That is not a good statement to view.

Any questions? Comment.