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As of September 27, 2018, visitors can now see who owns the rights to a certain picture in Google images with just a couple of clicks. Google, in collaboration with the photo industry consortium Coordination of European Picture Agencies Stock, CEPIC, and the global standards body for the news media International Press Telecommunications Council, IPTC have added the creator and credit metadata into photo search results.

Images are often used on the web with little, and sometimes no credits at all and finding out who owns the copyright of the images has always been difficult. This action of Google follows the recent European Union (EU) ruling, favoring the rights of photographers for online publishing.

To see this information on Google Images, you can click on the “Image Credits” link to view the metadata fields. The copyright notice metadata will also be added over the coming weeks, as stated by Google.

This is not the first time that Google took action in protecting the rights of images. It can be remembered that they removed the “View Image” button a year ago from search results, in order to make it harder for people to download images without viewing the original website they are featured on.

This action for Google Images is not created just to delight all photographers but is also a big step towards recognizing the skills and creativity of all visual content creators and rights-holders.

Tags: cepic, coordination of european picture agencies stock, eu, google, google images, image credits, international press telecommunications council, iptc, metadata