I gave Phandy a really hard time last week. I found the program to be a great concept, but I couldn’t get past the fact that it strips the meta data from the photos submitted to its service.

Today, I decided to review Elements. It’s another excellent concept walking in the footsteps of Twitter and Tumblr, allowing followers to “like” or “cast” clipped or uploaded photographs and quotes.

Unlike Phandy, Elements allows the members to upload photos as well as clip images found on the Web. But, like Phandy and many other photography-sharing sites, the process strips the meta data from the image.

Taking images from web sites, as well as stripping meta data, is as old as the Web itself.  I’ve known Facebook wants unlimited usage and photo applications may remove data.  But, it wasn’t until these new community sites whose purpose it is to encourage the sharing of interesting and unique content came online that I took a moment to pull my head out of the sand.

When a process or application strips the identity of an image, the opportunity for unfair use is increased.

Large companies behind legislation such as “orphan works” (Is orphan works a piece of legislation? Does it have a name?) are looking for excuses to profit from imagery without crediting or compensating the creator or copyright holder. Although orphan works is silent for now, don’t discount the fact that large money is behind the effort and the desire to revive it is strong.

The more images floating around the Internet, the greater the opportunity for misuse. Nothing new. But, again, I have to stress that these new sharing sites, as cool as they are, are factories for future abuse of your copyright.

It seems like the biggest culprits are the sites that downsize images from the original file for easy viewing. I assume keeping the meta data in the image is a technical challenge. Even Flickr removes the data from the smaller files on its site.

The only solution I can see is the creation of an application for resizing images without stripping the meta data. It would have to be open-source and easy-to-implement code. If this code is available, then there must be a campaign to encourage programmers to use it and make it standard.

Lastly, if photographers can’t trust the Web community to keep their meta data intact, photographers will have to take additional steps. The good practice of adding watermarks to images will have to become a standard for all new media photographers.

Similar sites will continue to come online. I don’t believe the programmers producing these sites are malicious or trying to hurt photographers. Most seem to be fans of photography and are sensitive to the issue.

Nonetheless, rather than spending my valuable time denouncing every offending web site, I would rather look for solutions. 

Do you have a solution?

Rosh