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?