Google adds creator credit to Images

Google’s attempting to smooth out its relationship with photo rights holders by bringing some additional contextual data to its Image Search. In a blog post today, Product Manager Ashutosh Agarwal highlighted the company’s plan to associate Creator and Credit metadata with images served up via search.

The company notes that finding out who created a given image — and who owns the rights — has traditionally been tricky online. Google Images hasn’t been particularly useful in this manner, forcing users to hunt down that information themselves.

The information will start showing up on images today when available, and in the next few weeks Google will be adding a copyright notice. Users can find all this by clicking the “Image Credits” link on a given shot.

Google’s partnering with CEPIC (Center of the Picture Industry) and IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) to create best practices for attribution moving forward. The company has received pushback regarding Images of late. Back in February, Google dropped the View Images link as part of a settlement with Getty.