By Jon Canfield

If you’re not familiar with the Orphan Works Act of 2006, you should be. Essentially, this bill says that if someone makes a “reasonable” attempt to find the creator of a photograph (or other work) without success, they are free to use the image in any way they choose with no financial requirements – yep, you just gave away your work. The bill was introduced in the House last summer, and although it hasn’t yet been passed, the issue of “orphan works” isn’t likely to disappear in an Internet era in which so many people and organizations are pushing for digitization and easy access to as much educational and cultural content as possible.

So, what’s the best way to protect yourself? Well, the obvious answer is to make sure that your images can’t be claimed as orphans. In other words, make sure that ownership and contact information is attached to every image in your library. Luckily, most of us already do this. If you don’t, it’s a relatively easy task that takes little effort on your part.

If you use Photoshop, you already have everything you need to embed copyright and contact information into your images. Photoshop supports metadata templates, which you can access by selecting File > Get File Info. This opens a dialog with all metadata fields available to you. The two most important panels are Description (Figure 1) and IPTC Contact (Figure 2).

I have my standard template set up with my name, copyright status and notice, along with my URL on the Description panel, while the IPTC Contact panel contains my name, address, phone number, and URL. Now, I can see some eyes rolling and thinking that this is way too much work to enter for every image. You’re right, it would be. But, by clicking the arrow at the upper right of the dialog, you can save the information for future use. Since I want this data attached to all my images, I save it as “Basic”.

When I review images in Bridge after copying them from the memory card, the first step I do is to select all images and Select Append Metadata from the popup menu on the Metadata panel. This gets easier in Photoshop Lightroom and Bridge CS3 because both programs will import your images directly from camera or card and apply the metadata at the same time. And, since this is standard IPTC data, every program that understands metadata will read the information properly, making it much more difficult for someone to claim they made an unsuccessful effort to locate the owner of the image.

Although I’ve used Photoshop as the example here, you can take similar actions with almost all image organizing or editing programs, such as iView Media Pro, Aperture, Portfolio, etc.

The important thing here is consistency. Make it a habit to apply this metadata to every image before doing anything else with them. You’ll never regret it.

Figure 1