Google is trying to soften its relationship with the owners of photographic rights by providing some additional contextual data to their image search. In a blog post today, Product Manager Ashutosh Agarwal highlighted the company's plan to associate the Creator and Credit metadata with images served through the search.
The company notes that discovering who created a certain image, and who owns the rights, has traditionally been complicated online. Google Images has not been especially useful in this way, forcing users to search for that information themselves.
Information will begin to appear in the images today when it becomes available, and in the coming weeks Google will add a copyright notice. Users can find all this by clicking on the "Image Credits" link in a given shot.
Google has partnered with CEPIC (Center for the Image Industry) and IPTC (Telecommunications Council of the international press) to create best practices for attribution in the future. The company has received a setback with respect to the Images of afternoon. In February, Google abandoned the link See images as part of an agreement with Getty.