Adobe Wants to Help Authenticate Your Photos. What Should Photographers Think?

Adobe Wants to Help Authenticate Your Photos. What Should Photographers Think?

At Adobe MAX 2019, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky announced the Content Authenticity Initiative – a nascent and ambiguously defined way for attribution to travel with an image and allow consumers to know, in the words of Adobe VP Dana Rao, that “the content they’re seeing is authentic.”

In announcing the initiative alongside partners The New York Times and Twitter, Belsky said, “Together, we’re developing an industry-wide standard to allow creators to put their mark on their work and have that attribution accompany that piece of content across different platforms, posts and stories.”

What exactly is it?

Details are murky. But the initiative sounds like an idea composed of two main parts:

  1. A metadata standard that captures creator information (akin to IPTC) and tracks changes to the original file. This could be some sort of distillation of the History panel in Photoshop.
  2. An image registry, which acts as a centralized (or perhaps a decentralized mechanism using blockchain technology) repository of metadata.

Don’t get too excited

On its face, the announcement and alliance seems like a positive development for photographers to address issues of “orphaned” works. But there are a few reasons to be skeptical:

  1. Metadata standards for attribution already exist. The problem is that many social media platforms strip the metadata. Sites that don’t strip the data, rarely display it. Google Images took a step in Oct 2018 to display copyright and creator info.
  2. Image registries have never succeeded. In the past, the lack of support and adoption by major players (e.g. Google Images) has spelled doom for image registries. Adobe’s support is a huge boost in the right direction. 
  3. Adobe hasn’t clearly defined their goal. Is attribution the most important (great for creators)? Is authenticity most important (great for news sources, good for creators)?
  4. A much broader coalition is needed. Top-tier news organizations already vet their photo sources and provide attribution, so the NYT’s involvement doesn’t do much for photographers or consumers. Twitter’s support is non-trivial but without similar support from Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms that have been plagued by misattribution, theft, manipulation, etc, the initiative is likely to fail.
  5. Amplification of “fake” news/content is unaddressed. Belsky states, “…over time consumers will expect content to come with attribution.” I think this is fallacious thinking. Misinformation will spread even if you label it as such. We’ve all seen friends post satirical pieces only to have their friends and followers take it seriously. Attribution is an important foundational step, but until media platforms disallow amplification of “inauthentic” content (e.g. removing “Share” links or making content less visible in news feeds), misuse and theft will remain rampant.

It’s early days, so let’s hope

Adobe’s motivation for addressing this problem seems sincere, and they undoubtedly have many smart people thinking about the issue. Hopefully they will be able to persuade a critical mass of companies to join the initiative and develop and deploy the technologies needed to make it a success.

Next Post:
Previous Post:
This article was written by

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

There are 9 comments for this article
  1. Pingback: Weekend Reading 11.7.2019 - ASMP
  2. Pingback: Adobe Wants to Help Authenticate Your Photos. What Should Photographers Think? - ASMP
  3. Phil Luyer at 1:33 am

    Speaking of which – I’m in discussions with support at the moment Allen, trying to explain a simple request…

    Is it possible for PhotoShelter to allow us to embed photos in external sites without stripping the metadata out of the shared images?

  4. Phil Luyer at 7:26 am

    “Metadata standards for attribution already exist. The problem is that many social media platforms strip the metadata. Sites that don’t strip the data, rarely display it. Google Images took a step in Oct 2018 to display copyright and creator info.”

    Allen – Photoshelter also strips metadata from images it hosts, can we change that?

      • Phil Luyer at 5:41 pm

        It’s there on you side Jeff, but if you try to embed an image elsewhere (or someone else does it with your photos), then all the info is stripped out…

        I was experimenting with some scripting to display metadata in blog posts when I wrote this, and sent this example to photoshelter support to explain what I was talking about..

        https://blog.highoctanephotos.com/p/example-for-photoshelter.html

        In all but the last photo, those are hosted on an old and rarely used website of mine that hasn’t been updated in years – the last is on my photoshelter hosted site (photoshelter also state that they strip metadata from embedded images to improve image load times – but it’d be nice to have an option to turn that off)

  5. Carl Seibert at 3:15 pm

    Adobe? Skeptical? Tsk. Tsk. I agree, though.

    These are the guys who brought us XMP. To be fair, it’s not entirely Adobe’s really that XMP became a balkanized mess and, instead of being our salvation, became, well, what it is. But it is mostly Adobe’s fault.

    Also, too be fair, the IPTC is involved the CAI. So there’s that.

    Does Photoshelter really strip metadata? If so, that needs to be fixed, pronto!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *