Patrick Krupa, Author at SmartFrame

Google Licensable badge: What you need to know

Patrick Krupa — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 11:23:57 +0000

Google’s Licensable badge feature makes it easy to find licensable images without needing to leave Google Images. We take a look at how it works and how to prepare your images and site for it.

In 2020, Google launched its Google Licensable badge feature, which aimed to make it easier to find and license images for use.

For many, this was a change that was welcome but long overdue. As our article on image downloading attitudes explains, research conducted by SmartFrame in 2019 indicated that many people use search engines to find images they want to use, with a majority specifically using Google Images. That in itself isn’t an issue, more the fact that many people are prepared to download images straight from these searches, without regard for copyright or licensing restrictions that may be in place.

This is despite warnings that have been present on Google Images results since 2018, which explain that an image may be subject to copyright protection.

It’s for this reason that the badge should be an important consideration when protecting your images against online theft.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Google Licensable badge, including what this means for SmartFrame users.

What is a licensable image?

A licensable image is an image that can be used by others, providing they agree to specific terms. A fee will typically be charged too.

These terms largely concern how the image may and may not be used (online or offline, geographical restrictions, editorial use only and so on). Other conditions, such as whether any accreditation needs to be displayed, may also feature here.

What does licensable mean on Google Images? And what is the Google Licensable badge?

The Google Licensable badge, which has also been referred to as the Google Licensable label, is a small notification that appears over thumbnail images in Google Images searches. The badge makes it clear that the image may be licensed for use.

It’s important to note that seeing the word ‘licensable’ when browsing Google Images means that while it is possible to obtain a license to the image, the process of doing so does not happen through Google. Google simply indicates which images can be licensed, according to the information it has on them.

So how do you get a license for such an image? When the user clicks on the image, further details are revealed. There’s a License Details notification, which links to details of the license itself. The name of the licensor’s website is also included here, as is the name of the creator and the credit required for attribution.

How do I attach the Google Licensable badge to my images?

Google has stated that those who wish for licensing information to be displayed on their images should include the relevant information in one of two ways.

The first method is to use structured data (markup), while the other way is to append IPTC metadata to the image itself. Whichever way you use, this information can then be read by Google and automatically included where necessary.

In other words, you do not need to apply for this separately. You just need to make sure to include it in a way that Google can read it from your images.

As the IPTC Organization explains on its website, proper use of the Web Statement of Rights field is what determines whether the Licensable badge appears. This field needs to contain a valid URL, which should link to an explanation of the copyright ownership and what the license on offer allows.

Not sure what IPTC metadata is? We’ve put together a separate article that goes into this in more detail.

What’s the difference between structured data and IPTC metadata?

The main difference between the two is that IPTC metadata remains part of the image wherever it goes, whereas structured data exists within a web page and so it remains separate.

For most content owners, appending IPTC metadata to the image – or separately in a sidecar file – probably makes more sense. In other cases, such as when the image in question is hosted elsewhere or when its IPTC fields are not accessible for some reason, structured data may make more sense.

Google explains structured data in more detail on its Developers blog.

When will the badge be available?

While the launch of the badge was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, it went live in August 2020 and is now available for use.

Is there anything I should do to ensure it works with my images?

The first thing you should do is to fill in all relevant IPTC fields so that the badge can be displayed.

Google also underlines the importance of site accessibility, and being able to crawl and index relevant pages.

Weren’t licensing options already included in Google Images searches?

Prior to the launch of the badge, the only way to find out if an image was licensable was to use the Google Images results filter.

Simply click on the Tools option underneath the search bar and a number of filters appear. These include Size, Color and Type, and they’re joined by an option called Usage Rights.

Clicking on Usage Rights gives you four options for filtering – labeled for commercial reuse with modifications; labelled for reuse; labeled for noncommercial reuse with modifications; and labeled for noncommercial reuse – as well as an additional option that instructs Google not to filter results by license type.

So if Google already had an option to filter by license type, why did it introduce the Licensable badge?

The main difference between the two appears to concern whether the image in question is licensable for a fee. The existing four options all result in images that can be used without cost, whereas the Licensable badge allows the content owner to detail licensing terms (including costs) on their own website.

For many years, Google Images has been viewed as an easy and obvious place from which to steal images. Google had previously displayed options to view images at particular sizes underneath images, and many have suspected that their removal was in response to this criticism – particularly as it added a notice about respecting copyright in its place.

The Licensable badge makes it clear that an image may be licensed, but that it can only be used in accordance with specific conditions that are detailed by the content owner on their website. Those wishing to discover these terms must, therefore, click through to the website to view them, as these would not fall under the existing filtering options.

Can I search only for images that can be licensed?

Yes, you can. As Google explains on its Developers Blog, you can filter results so that only images with Creative Commons licenses, or those with commercial or other licenses, are displayed. To do this, just click on the Usage Rights drop-down filter when searching.

How does this affect SmartFrames?

SmartFrame supports this feature and generates a thumbnail compatible with the Google Licensable badge standard.

In order to activate this, relevant metadata fields have to be populated. If your source image contains the relevant metadata it will be imported automatically, although you can add the missing metadata manually for images that have already been uploaded to SmartFrame (and even batch-edit image metadata here if you need to).

You’ll also need to enable the Image Search Engine thumbnail option in the Control section of the Admin Panel. Once that’s done, SmartFrame generates thumbnails that are optimized for Google with all of the metadata included.

A few tips here: Google Images favours thumbnails that are fairly large and have a common aspect ratio, as opposed to images with a more atypical aspect ratio (such as panoramic images). If you want your images to rank better, set the size of the thumbnail to the largest one available.

Additionally, in order to minimize the likelihood of image theft, we suggest adding a watermark to your thumbnails, which can be configured in the SmartFrame Admin Panel.

How do I make this badge work for my business?

First of all, you need to know whether web users can easily find your images. The simplest way is to publish your images and try searching for them using keywords in Google Images.

There isn’t a single recipe for this, and it very much depends on what content you want to publish. Unique and unusual keywords may get less traffic, but these are more likely to be found among the competition. You may wish to use a keyword tool – or an application that includes one, such as Google’s own Google Ads – to find common search terms.

If you’re not one of the largest image agencies with a big marketing budget and a huge content library, you will find it difficult to compete with commonly searched keywords. That’s why carving a niche for your content is a better strategy than a direct confrontation.

The Google Images crawler analyses the webpage where the image is hosted – often called the asset page – so it’s important that the page meets the usual SEO criteria. There are many SEO resources and guides out there, but the following points cover the basics.

The asset page should contain text relevant to the image, such as a description or caption
The asset page metadata (title, keywords and description) should be relevant to the image content and meet the usual SEO criteria, such as the recommended length and format
Content should be unique, so avoid duplicates and repetitions (ideally, a similar page should not exist anywhere else)
Use human-friendly URLs for both the asset page and the thumbnail
The thumbnail’s filename should be human friendly too
Make sure your SSL certificate is valid and your website address always redirects to https://
Make sure your image is optimized for mobile devices
Finally, be sure that it’s optimized to allow for fast page loading

The Google Images crawler also needs to be able to find the asset page. End users usually get to these pages by searching for keywords, but Google’s crawler doesn’t know what to search for and the search page becomes a dead end. If the page is not linked to another page, it may be invisible to Google.

One solution is to publish collections, featured images and category trees that help the search bot navigate your inventory. You can also generate sitemaps and image sitemaps for your content, and instruct Google where to find them.

My images are configured for the Licensable badge. What next?

You need to know whether users are interested in your content and clicking through to your website.

Make sure you have set up Google Analytics correctly. That way, you will be able to measure the impact the Licensable badge has on your website.

It also pays to think of the Licensable badge as an additional ‘Buy now’ button for your thumbnails, and to consider the user journey.

It needs to link to a page where the user can purchase the license and download the image. Licensing terms and pricing should be clear, and the purchase needs to be one click away.

Remember that users coming from Google Images may be visiting your website for the first time, and that they will land on the image asset page directly, without visiting the homepage. They are most likely just interested in purchasing the license quickly and affordably, so you should endeavour to make the process as painless as possible.

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How to protect your images online: Complete guide to keeping photos safe – Part 2

Patrick Krupa — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:16:17 +0000

In the concluding part of a two-part series on protecting your images, we explain how to stop hotlinking, disabling right-click downloading, and making images invisible to website-scraping bots

In the first part of this guide, we looked at how to protect images on social media, as well as watermarking, guarding against screenshot attempts, and adding copyright information.

In this concluding article, we look at some of the more advanced measures that are used for protecting images. We also look at their main shortcomings, which you should consider if attempting to manually implement them.

Hotlinking

Hotlinking is a problem that dates back to the beginning of the internet, when hosting and bandwidth were expensive.

Instead of downloading the image, website owners would display it on their website by linking to its original location. As a result, the image would load from another server, which would have the effect of using bandwidth and storage provided by the image owner.

Such hotlinking is often carried out by bots that automatically create websites using content aggregated from other sites. The reason? By scraping this content, a malicious user can make money from banner ads displayed alongside or, alternatively, simply claim the content as their own.

Not all hotlinking is bad, of course. The best example of legitimate hotlinking is Google Images, something many of us rely on without really considering how it works. When your images are scanned by Google Images, Google caches a small thumbnail that can be displayed in search results. Once the thumbnail is clicked, however, the magnified image no longer comes from Google, but from the image owner’s website.

Hotlinking can be prevented with the ‘.htaccess’ configuration file, although SmartFrame users can also block and control this through the SmartFrame Admin Panel, and customize the way such a thumbnail is displayed in search results here too.

Robots meta directives

A common way to instruct web crawlers is by using a ‘robots.txt’ or meta robots tag in the header of a webpage. This can contain directives for web bots that tells them whether to index the website or not.

There are a dozen different settings but the most commonly used ones are ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’.

One thing that you should bear in mind is that this is just a polite request, not protection. Legitimate search engines will always honor it, while others will ignore it and still crawl the website to scrape the content, if this is their intention.

Programmatic content scraping

This is almost always a malicious activity, which involves downloading the entirety of a website’s content, usually with the goal of cloning the site.

There are a number of reasons why someone may want to do this. Much as when using hotlinking to do the same thing, cloning a website can be used to generate fake traffic and banner-ad revenue, or to sell counterfeit products. It can also be used for phishing, whereby sensitive details – including debit and credit card details – are obtained from unsuspecting shoppers.

Detecting such activity is difficult, especially when you consider that this can be executed on a computer – rather than a server – impersonating a human user.

So-called lazy loading – or dynamically generated – pages make it harder for bots to find images, as certain manual interaction is required to display images on the webpage. It’s clearly more difficult for an internet bot to generate such an interaction.

Unfortunately, there is another method, and it doesn’t require much technical knowledge or effort. Legitimate browser-plugin marketplaces contain free programs that allow for all images on a webpage to be downloaded. These may even follow links on the page in an attempt to download the whole website.

This activity is best avoided by an appropriate server and website configuration, but as long as an image is displayed on a public website, the image source file has to be available to the public in one way or another.

Obfuscating the source file

One way around this is to hide the image source file from this code so that it cannot be scraped by a bot (or manually stolen by a human user).

We’ve seen several creative ways to hide the image source file while displaying the image on a web page. It has been known, for example, for webmasters to program a website in such a way that the image address can only be directly accessed by the website domain.

Some images only load when certain conditions are met, such as when a user presses an arrow button in a gallery, or scrolls down the page. Although links to images loaded into the page as a result of such events may not be included in the source code, and may be harder for a bot to capture, such front-end events are becoming more standardized and easier to predict – especially in the current environment, where most websites are based on a few major frameworks and libraries.

We’ve also seen some extreme measures here, such as where a webmaster deliberately introduces an error and renames the files with an incorrect extension in order to pretend these aren’t actually JPEGs. Most browsers’ error-handling algorithm will correct this issue, but such a solution can have catastrophic results, as some browsers are not able to correct this mistake and will display a blank image instead.

Disabling right-clicks

The most common way to prevent right-click downloading of images is to place a transparent layer over the image itself. You can also disable anything being triggered by a right-click action using Javascript.

It is, however, relatively easy to circumvent this protection by looking into the source file of the webpage, using common developer tools that are built into almost every browser.

Even if the webmaster disabled direct access to the image address, every image displayed in a browser can be found in the downloaded resources.

Common underlying problem

While helpful to a certain extent, none of these methods resolve the underlying problem, which is that, sooner or later, the image will have to be presented to the user, and transmitted to – and cached by – the user’s browser. The image is almost always present in the source code and relatively easy to access.

This is where a solution such as SmartFrame comes in, its robustness owed to a completely different approach when serving images.

Rather than downloading an image file to the user’s browser, a request to display an image is sent to the cloud. Serving the image data is subject to meeting minimum security conditions. Once a handshake between the website requesting the file and the cloud is established, the image can be transmitted through this channel – and only this channel. In other words, the image is transmitted and rendered – quite literally, pixel by pixel – on the authorized webpage.

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Publishing photos online is more risky than you might think (Part 2)

Patrick Krupa — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 12:20:03 +0000

This is a sequel to the article we published last week. Just to remind, I’m writing about real-life horror stories of publishing images online and I explain how to avoid them.

6. Bulk image download

Website cloning is usually done just by running a few lines of code. But if someone wants to grab all the images from your website manually it is not going to be difficult. This is because all the images are in the source code and the website pages are linked. Below you can see a free Image Downloader plugin for Google’s Chrome that I used to download 181 photographs of handbags from Google Images. The plugin downloads every JPEG on the website page in just a few seconds. Do these images belong to Google Images? Of course not, Google Images is just a gateway allowing me to obtain direct access to any relevant images hosted by website owners across the world. We don’t even have to visit their websites to download all these images in full resolution.

Our solution: As advised earlier, don’t publish JPEGs because they will all be listed in the source code and easy to grab. SmartFrame is completely inpenetrable to the plugin I use in the example below.

7. Re-sharing without permission and viral distribution

As we have explained, sharing pictures online can result in images being altered without permission and re-shared as memes. Success Kid, an image taken by a photographer of her son, is a well known photo that went viral. After posting the image to Flickr people modified the image and added their own slogans. A father posting a photo of him and his son discovered the picture on Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook after it was modified and turned into a meme. In this case parents managed to monetise the photograph and even support a campaign funding father’s kidney transplant, but kid’s face remains on the internet forever and cannot be erased.

Out of respect for the kid and also copyright issues, I decided not to publish his photo here but used a licensed stock photo instead. You can find the original photo of the Success Kid and a very interesting background story on Wikipedia.

Our solution: Don’t give away the source file because it can be modified and re-shared. SmartFrame has built-in sharing and embedding tools that allow for the sharing of photos as SmartFrames, without access to the source image.

8. Impersonation

It is hard to believe that someone would steal a photo and claim the image as their own. Photographer Martin Leckie is one of many who have suffered at the hands of online photo scam artists. He discovered that his photos – and complete website design (minus a minor colour change) – had been copied by the UK’s Coleen Sullivan. This type of photo theft is probably more common than you think.

You can read more about this case and many other similar cases on the StopStealingPhotos website, dedicated to tracking and exposing such activity.

Our solution: Make sure that your photos are safe and protected from theft. SmartFrame successfully prevents at least 95 percent of unauthorised image downloads, according to our research.

9. Commercial usage without your permission

Do you recognise this man below? I seriously doubt that Subaru Black Hair Shampoo paid George Clooney for the headshot used to advertise the product. Any time you share a photo online there is a risk that it can be used for commercial purposes.

For example, Christmas photo of an American family was displayed on a Czech billboard without their consent. The photo was uploaded to a personal blog and social media website by a member of the family. Imagine how shocked the family were to find it had been published on a billboard after the owner of a store in Prague found it online and used it to promote his business. In another case, a crashed car uploaded by a Flickr user was used as part of an advertising campaign by Virgin Australia. The photographer didn’t check the license rights of the uploaded image. In this case, it was one that allowed for commercial use. Virgin Australia was able to legally use the picture without paying the photographer a single penny.

Our solution: Apart using various means to protect your images as discussed already, it is important to be aware that someone is using your images. SmartFrame works in partnership with ImageRights, a reverse search engine that identifies when a photo has been published without the owner’s consent. If a photo you own is used for commercial purposes, you may be able to make a lucrative compensation claim. ImageRights provides a no-win, no-fee legal support service and can represent your interests in court. Talk to us to find out more.

10. Users downloading without permission

I know these scams are pretty scary. You may think that it will never happen to you. But remember, billions of people browse the Internet. Someone might just like your photo. This begs the question of how someone actually does attempt to steal an image online.

We asked a group of Internet users to make a record of their unauthourised attempts to download an image. Each person surveyed made a right mouse click and tried to drag-and-drop the image. If this didn’t work, the next step was often to inspect the source code of the website. Some users attempted to save the website to a file on their hard drive or use image download plugins. Others took a screenshot or attempted more exotic methods to steal an online photo. Our study found that a simple copyright warning was enough to deter most attempts.

We estimate that about 90 percent of online photos fail to disclose the photographer who took the image. Basic information about the picture is also often absent, such as where it was taken and the intellectual property rights relating to the image. Always remember to take the following steps to protect your online photos:

Include author and copyright information in the metadata.
Watermark the image
Don’t publish large images as JPEGs

Our solution: Protection against all known methods of accidental image download or theft. In our study, half of those who attempted to unlawfully download an image gave up in the first 30 seconds before searching for an alternative picture on Google Images. Only 10 percent spent more than 60 seconds trying to hack SmartFrame’s download protection. Very few succeeded. By default every image uploaded to the SmartFrame platform is protected from the following manual download methods:

Right click and download or attempting to open in a new tab.
Drag and drop.
Saving a website to a file.
Looking for an image path in the source code.
Searching for the image in a browser resources panel.
A screenshot attempt (the most common method).
Use of image download plugins.

SmartFrame also loads a sharing and embedding panel into the image area, together with configurable author information and a copyright warning. You can even watermark every image automatically and track each download attempt.

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Publishing photos online is more risky than you might think (Part 1)

Patrick Krupa — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 12:21:01 +0000

We upload 1.8 billion photos to the Internet every day. It is easy to assume that images will simply serve their original purpose, whether it be selling a product, showcasing creative work or sharing holiday pictures with family members. But what really does happen to these photos? Here we reveal ten real-life horror stories and explain how to avoid them.

A single image can go viral in hours and end up on thousands of websites and social networks, often in the wrong context and with no trace of where it originally came from. Once an image has been uploaded, there is no delete button. There is very little chance that every image can be removed. This makes it of vital importance to take precautions before a precious photo becomes the next Internet meme.

1. You won’t know you’ve been hacked

These days, many of us have a WordPress blog. Those who don’t regularly update a WordPress blog run the risk of being hacked. Many people are often unaware that someone else has obtained administrative access to their blog. A London-based company I worked for had its website hacked. After the attack, the scammers sent millions of spam e-mails from the website over the course of the year. Once hackers obtain access to a website, all content can be downloaded, including hidden unpublished photos. What happens to these stolen images is anybody’s guess. There have been cases of digital kidnapping, where hackers threaten to upload family photos to extremely inappropriate websites.

Our solution: Use a secure cloud hosting service such as SmartFrame, which provides a state-of-the-art online vault, monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

2. Social networks legally hijack your content

Everyone knows that Facebook takes ownership of all images uploaded to the world’s biggest social network. Rival websites may also obtain metadata that allows users to easily download images. After photos are uploaded, you may have just given them unlimited license to use them the way that they want. Facebook is just one example. Giphy stores users’ images forever. Those that fail to register an uploaded image may never be able to find the picture or delete it. But you still want to share photos with friends. So what can you do?

Our solution: Host an image outside of the Facebook platform and only share a small but correctly formatted thumbnail, which includes a brief description and link to your secure-hosted photo. The SmartFrame platform does this automatically and lets you customise Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn thumbnails.

3. Google Image Search is really good and really bad for photos at the same time

The moment an image is published, all types of web crawlers will start indexing the picture. About half of the traffic on our website emanates from automated bots. These programs usually scan the source code of a webpage. Most download a photo in full resolution to create a thumbnail. In some cases a high resolution copy will be stored to enable quicker uploads. This is not ideal considering that permission has not been granted. Such incidents raise bigger issues of ownership rights and data privacy that we address in the services that we offer.

The power of Google Images is another risk. Seen as a free image resource, most internet users search for photos on Google Images without any intention of purchasing a publishing license, requesting permission to use the picture or even checking on the copyright status. If your photo is published in high enough resolution, the picture is always just one click away in Google. But what if you don’t want to be hidden from Google Images?

Our solution: Bots can only read common formats such as JPG or PNG so we publish a small thumbnail with a link. A user that clicks on the link will be directed to a secure page hosting the full-size photograph. Make sure that the thumbnail contains the relevant metadata, including author and copyright information. The SmartFrame platform provides all of the above measures by default.

4. No-copyright zone is still out there

I grew up in Poland during the late eighties. My dad’s job was to copy album covers and T-shirts before re-printing them without any permission. I can still hand draw the Metallica or Iron Maiden logo from memory, a testament to how many times I copied these logos. We supplied these bootleg goods to shops in the city center. We made a lot of money. And the best part of it was that everything we did was completely legal. Imagine the Internet existed back then. We would have printed and sold absolutely anything that we were able to download.

We estimate that about 70 percent of the population lives in countries where there is either no copyright law or it is not properly enforced. Random images from the Internet are not just downloaded, they are used for anything from billboards to packaging, without any regard to permission rights or intellectual property laws. Even in the US or Europe, it is not easy to deal with copyright breaches and taking legal action is often a costly and lengthy process.

Our solution: Prevent access from outside of the copyright zone. For example, the SmartFrame platform allows users to blacklist domains, monitor where SmartFrames are being shared and block certain geographical regions.

5. Website cloning

I won’t mention the brand that makes handbags that cost more than £1,000. You can imagine the amount of work that goes into every photoshoot. You can also imagine how many fake copies are made and sold globally. While these counterfeit goods are pale imitations, there is no easier way to sell them than just publishing a photo of the original product. Downloading single images from the original manufacturer’s website would be far too time consuming. A scammer based in China simply downloaded the entire website and republished it under a new URL, that of course added the crook’s shopping basket.

Our solution: Don’t include images in the source code. It is not easy to do and to the best of my knowledge, SmartFrame is the only currently available solution that makes images completely to any automated website cloning scripts.

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