On the Photo Attorney web site, I just found a link to a story that illustrates how useful metadata can be. You can read the full account at Kevin German’s Wandering Light blog.
But the bones of the issue are that German found that another photographer he had travelled with had copied his raw files from his computer on the trip, as well as downloading images from his web site, and used these images to enter the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition. The theft came to light when German sent in the same work.
Perhaps the thief hadn’t appreciated that every image carries a camera identification in the metadata, and German could prove the images were shot on his camera (a Canon 5D.) You can display the serial number in Photoshop or Lightroom (with great difficulty) but not all software that can read EXIF displays it. One free program that seems to be able to show everything, at least for Nikon (and some other cameras) is PhotoME, which clearly shows the camera serial number in my RAW files (or jepgs shot in camera.) It doesn’t get written into jpegs exported from Lightroom. PhotoMe also shows the shutter count.
It turned o ut that image theft wasn’t the culprits only crime, and as a comment on the post suggests, “he might be the only guy in history to blacklisted from both the New York Stock Exchange and the Photojournalism community at the same time!”
German has now registered his entire online portfolio along with the entire RAW shoot from his trip with the US Copyright Office; you can file on-line as a zip containing several hundred files for 35 USD, and he will be visibly watermarking his on-line images from now on. The latest regulations for electronic uploading seem to make it possible to upload a large collection of works on a fast connection (there is a 30 minute maximum upload time) “made up of multiple published works contained in the same unit of publication and owned by the same claimant” for a single charge, which can now be paid by credit/debit card. It’s something I’ll be trying out for some of my web images in the near future.