Archive for July, 2012
Follies: Fabulous, Fanciful and Frivolous Buildings
July 19th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
If I don’t blow my own trumpet nobody else is going to do it for me*, so I’d like to announce that — TA RA! — today is the publication day of my latest book Follies: Fabulous, Fanciful and Frivolous Buildings. It’s published by the National Trust and it has lots of lovely photographs and just four by fotoLibra members. Out of my hands, I’m afraid.
This is what it looks like, and if you’d like to read the story of how it came about, I’ve gone into a lot more detail on my personal fotoLibrarian blog, right here.
This is a hardback book and has nothing to do with our own Heritage Ebooks on follies, except sharing an author. fotoLibra members who supplied images of follies under the advanceImages scheme will be getting notifications and sales data built in to the new fotoLibra Version 5.0 website, shortly to be launched. There will be an announcement on this blog.
This little book is what is known in the trade as a Slim Volume. But it should make a pleasant present. It’s a tiny hardback, with lots of pretty pictures so you don’t have to read too much of my text. Available of all good booksellers, is what they say. ISBN 978-1-907892-30-1
One note of naked self-interest — if you are kind enough to buy it, please try and choose a retailer other than Amazon, where deep discounts mean someone has to be cut out of the equation if the publisher and bookseller are to make any money. And yes, you’ve guessed it — it’s the author. But I can supply signed copies for £8.99 plus £2.20 postage in the UK if you email me, or let me know in a comment to this post.
* certainly not the publisher …
How Easy It Is To Strip Metadata
July 4th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Here’s a great photograph by Gabor Poszgai that we sold to The Sun yesterday:
Purely as a matter of interest I tried to drag the image off the page. Obviously it had no fotoLibra watermark, as we had sold them the image, but I wanted to see how easy it would be to copy the image and use it for my own nefarious purposes — steal it, that is.
Here’s the message I got:
That’s interesting. I couldn’t drag the image off, and there was an image protection warning.
So I tried right-clicking it, a procedure incomprehensible to we Mac users but which involves holding down the ctrl key while tapping the pen on the tablet.
This is what came up:
Gosh again. They really didn’t want me to pull off the photo.
So we pulled it off, and I had a look at the metadata.
When The Sun bought the image, it was supplied with full metadata including this caption and these keywords:
So you can see who took the picture, what it is, and where to find it. When I looked at the metadata for the image in The Sun, this is what I got:
Empty. Blank. Nada. Bare. Stripped. Descamisados.
Why should they do that? Damien somewhat cynically remarked “Why keep it? They didn’t need it, so they threw it out.”
But that would mean extra work — someone would have to be specifically employed to hack off the metadata, unless it was an automated procedure. Why would News International want to remove the metadata from images they buy? Maybe Photoshop, with its inbuilt metadata stripping feature (see ‘Adobe — Stop Overcharging UK Customers‘) was to blame.
Anyway, I’m puzzled. What is the point of embedding metadata so it travels with the picture, telling you what it is, who took it and when, where it is, all about it, how to find it and buy it, if it’s simply thoughtlessly stripped out the first time it’s sold? It’s the writing on the back of the print. Why rub it out? What is the point? Who benefits?