Will Teru Kuwayama Change Facebook’s Approach to Photos?

Will Teru Kuwayama Change Facebook’s Approach to Photos?

Facebook recently announced the appointment of photojournalist Teru Kuwayama as its Photo Community Liason in an effort to “make sure that the interests of photographers are represented in everything from feature development on the technical side to the terms of service on the legal side,” according to PDN. The move is notable because although photos are the dominant “sticky” feature of the site, Facebook has historically had a somewhat rocky relationship with the medium (e.g. stripping of metadata, slippery terms and conditions, banning of breast feeding photos while allowing violent content, etc) while storing a staggering 250 billion photos – the largest repository of images on the planet.

But the appointment of a professional photographer shouldn’t necessarily signal a change in focus for the site. Facebook is a consumer social network. It’s not a Flickr, Getty Images nor PhotoShelter.

Kuwayama declined comment, but here are a few changes we would love to see in 2014.

1. Attribution & Copyright Notices
Allow content creators to specify copyright and derivatives (like Creative Commons). Flickr has done it for years in a social media setting and it has worked to elevate awareness of intellectual property rights. If Facebook does it, other social networks will follow.

flickr

2. End the Stripping of Metadata
You opted into the Facebook T&C thereby relinquishing your DMCA right to stripping metadata, but let’s put that aside for a moment. Photo metadata serves an important functional purpose of providing caption, contact and copyright information. It’s true that metadata can also bloat a photo file significantly, so very long captions might be out of the question. But what’s the harm in having contact and copyright information travel with the image?

3. Disallow Downloading of images
If a goal of the social network is to keep people within the walled garden, why allow users to download images? With a maximum image size of over 2000 pixels, Facebook images are large enough to allow content thieves to grab an use photos without permission.

download

Photo by Allen Murabayashi

4. Improve the Organization of Albums
Apple realized that people take a lot of photos and a flat album hierarchy doesn’t work well, therefore iOS7 introduced the concept of collections that are time and geographically aware. Facebook should do the same to allow aggregation by year, tags, people and places.

apple

 

A few changes to Photos will make it not only more useful, but more inline with attribution-friendly (and legally and morally correct) practices.

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Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

There are 4 comments for this article
  1. Jeremy "Taco" Patterson at 3:01 pm

    I’d like to see these changes, as well as better options for image quality. I mean, we’ve all seen how bad images look on Facebook, especially if there’s any significant amount of red in the shot, right? Surely they can spare a little more server space for better quality, or reduce the maximum size as a trade-off?

  2. Jacob James at 3:25 pm

    I’d like to see some improvement in the compression settings alongside these other changes, other social networks like G+ and Flickr don’t have this problem so why does FB have to have such terrible compression on it’s images?

  3. Bryon McCartney at 5:42 pm

    I would like to see the issue of nudity addressed on Facebook. The FB rules on nudity are often applied in arbitrary ways. It would be great to see a system similar (but improved) to that used on Flickr where you are responsible for rating your own images when you upload them and viewers can define what types of images they want to see, and children are prevented from viewing nudity altogether. Among breast-feeding mothers, nude models and fine art photographers, ‘Nipple-Gate’ is a hot topic that needs to be addressed on FB.

  4. Matt at 1:35 pm

    As far as I know, there is no way to stop someone from taking a photo – the very process of viewing the photo through a web browser necessitates it being downloaded to your machine, and there are easy ways around scripts that disallow right-clicking on photos.

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