Fair enough – if a burned-in watermark fits your workflow, that’s a legitimate route. Two things it doesn’t solve, though. The label has to stay legible when the image is scaled down – text that reads fine at 900px can disappear in a three-column grid on a phone. And on a site with hundreds of photos, that’s hundreds of files to re-export and probably re-link by hand; on a multilingual site, once per language, since the label text has to be translated too (the EU alone has 24 official languages).
That’s why I was thinking of something more automated: a checkbox and maybe a free text field in Elements, so the label is generated at output time instead of baked into the pixels.
Either way, my main intention was to raise awareness that this exists at all – and that ignoring it can get expensive. I don’t need it urgently myself – for my Elements template previews I can handle it by hand, and my business sites run on WordPress, where automated solutions already exist.
I’ve had to deal with legal issues before… and arguments can be made from both sides and interpreted….