Hi @dan, As I start using RW8, which is a fantastic development. I can’t help thinking that I should say something as a photographer.
The Unsplash function is a great new resource for people to use. Part of their facility is to give photographers a platform for showing and giving their images away. In a world where the use of images has become so common and taken for granted, Unsplash prompt people when downloading images to give a credit to the photographer who has created the image.
I’m wondering whether this is something that should be looked at. We consume images with a hearty appetite and many times think nothing of the origin of the photo. Perhaps a future enhancement to the function would be to add a copyright notice and credit based on the IPTC data of the image?
Not being a developer (I’ll leave that to the likes of you and your team who do a fantastic job).
I’m sure that if the tables were turned where people consumed code written by developers with an form of attribution or payment, something would be done?
When I use a photo, a video, a graphic or a written document that was not created by myself, I always place the author’s name in a caption. Even if I get any type of document from my family to place on a family portal, I ask them to provide affidavit of copyrights and their consent for publication.
This is not just a legal requirement, but a sign of respect for other people’s creative effort.
If you drag an Unsplash image into a Markdown page or Markdown stack, it wraps the image with proper <figure> and <figcaption> HTML tags. The default alternative text and caption use is the author coming from Unsplash. Another advantage of Markdown.
Note: there’s a bug right now if you add the image to local resources from Unsplash (right-click) it changes this to the filename. I reported this in another post but didn’t get a response on if it’s being addressed.
As for XMP or IPTC metadata, I would think that may have been stripped out for optimization but don’t know for sure. The images are coming from an Unsplash API, RapidWeaver doesn’t actually “read” the picture, so what data that is available is what’s in the API.
This is a tough call from a developer perspective. I know most users won’t add proper attribution. But I also know that photographers give their images to Unsplash and the commons to increase how much their images get seen.
If I make it supper easy to use these images in lots of ways, it will definitely increase how much they’re used improperly.
If I make it more difficult, or nag about attribution, it will definitely reduce how much the images are used and seen.
I’m not really certain what the right answer is.
But if you have any ideas how we could automatically add attribution (without breaking the terms of use from Unsplash), or encourage users to do the right thing, please let me know.
I’m very open to ideas and doing more work in this area to help photographers get the rightful publicity that they deserve for giving us access to their work.
Hi All, @teefers point about the markdown is one I’d not considered. Perhaps for a future release of RW there could be some way of being able to capture the and HTML tags and use them automatically when someone pulls an Unsplash photo into RW. Not just rely on the use of a Markdown page (which I grant you is a good solution), but to make it part of the app?
