Steal This Idea: WordPress Image Copyright Plugin

This post is part of my “Steal This Idea” series: free ideas for anyone to take and run with. Learn more about #StealThisIdea.

There’s a whole side to digital media that most people don’t see: metadata. Every picture taken with a digital camera has all sorts of details embedded in it, in the form of EXIF, IPTC and/or XMP data. This can include everything from the color profile of the image and when it was created down to whether or not the flash fired, the ISO settings, and — if a GPS was available — where the photo was taken.

Just inside “Mary’s Chamber”, where Mary, Queen of Scots was thought to stay

For example, here’s the output from a photo I took on my phone on a recent vacation:

That’s a lot of data, and I don’t even have location tagging enabled on my phone.

If I were shooting on something more sophisticated than my iPhone, I could also embed IPTC and XMP metadata, including details like comments, photographer info, and copyright. These are metadata standards that are more commonly used by professional media outlets to help protect their work.

The Idea

WordPress is a common platform for sharing news and ideas, but image metadata is largely ignored by the platform.

What if WordPress could automatically apply copyright details to each and every image uploaded to a site? What if someone running a photo blog could automatically have their details embedded in everything uploaded?

This could be accomplished via some of the EXIF functionality already in use by WordPress, or it could use ExifTool directly (for some insight on how to execute system binaries from within PHP, take a look at this blog post where I did just that with Gifsicle).

I’d imagine there would probably be a settings screen where the site owner could configure default values to write, and maybe the option to not overwrite anything already present in newly-uploaded media.

The ability to modify metadata on existing media would be nice, too.