Consilience

Here is my predicament:

I take photographs with my new shiny digital camera (thanks to all your input on my previous post) and I use F-Spot to manage my photos. I love F-Spot; it does almost everything I want it to do. It tags photos, it takes care of organizing the files on my harddrive (folders are not a method of categorization for photos, tags are), and it even uploads them to my flickr account.

The thing that it doesn’t do is let me embed my choice of license into the photos. It does let me embed the tags into the metadata, so the base functionality is there.

I am a huge supporter of Open content licenses, specifically Creative Commons licenses [ed: Greg is employed by Creative Commons] and I would love to see the ability to set the license of a photo to something of my choice (eg: CC:BY-SA) and have that license info be a part of the image no matter where it goes. And hey, there is even a bug report/feature request for this: here.

My proposed Use Case:
Jane is your typical photographer who uses Linux. As a Linux user she is more likely to know about open content licenses such as Creative Commons licenses and also more likely to use such a license for her photographs.

Jane takes a bunch of photos and imports them into F-Spot. F-Spot lets her set the license for a group of photos to CC:BY-SA. She then uploads those photos to her website. She makes it clear on her website that all her photos are licensed under CC:BY-SA.

Now, when Yahoo or Google go indexing her website their spiders can programatically discern that those photos are licensed under CC:BY-SA from the metadata. The benefits of this information can be seen when searching flickr for Creative Commons licenses: no more worrying about infringing on other’s copyright when you use a photo. Another example is search.creativecommons.org which searches across multiple sites at once for CC licensed material.

All kinds of cool new automated things can be thought of with this information available within the file. flickr automatically displaying the correct license for a photo without you having to specify it; the same thing with personally hosted photo galleries; users of sites like wikipedia can more easily find images for their uses; etc. Also, now that license information will always be in that file so others who find it will know what they can and can not do with it without asking.

Are you also interested in something like this? Take a look at the information on this wikipage which outlines what you need to do to support this in the XMP metadata standard. The how of doing it is most likely not that difficult since F-Spot is already supporting the metadata standard. Or just subscribe to this bug report so you are kept up to date on its progress.