It looks like the Boston Harbor image was updated/indexed 6 days ago. I don’t think Google uses the latest infos from your image/page.
The watermarked image is current, as presented in the search results, (I have the IPTC browser extension to check), but the data Google is working from is 6 days old, hence the flag. Looking at the search console data, it’s working its way through indexing my site, but only a few images (versus the 60 or so galleries). I think it’s slow because the site isn’t all that active.
Also, the instance you saw was from a link to the gallery of Boston images; depending on how you search, you will see the same image as either the gallery cover image - link is to the whole gallery - or just the image itself - the text underneath it will then say “Boats in Boston Harbor - digital bristles”
I am not where I want to be yet - i.e. I haven’t yet seen the magic licensable icon over one of my images in a Google image search - but there’s certainly progress.
This report from the Google Search Console shows that 10 images are recognized as “complete”. Not sure what that means to Google, but in case the watermarked thumbnail having copyright and licensing URL matters, I have deleted and re-uploaded those 10 files to add that metadata to the gallery images.
Hello Ben:
I am new to this forum, but not new to stock photography. I have been selling stock imagery for more than 30 years and just launched a new website, wildhorizons dot com. We removed the outdated and overly complicated gallery software from the site, and I’m searching for something better, possibly Backlight.
Many galley software options are available that do not support metadata in a friendly way. These programs are aimed at people who just want to share their pics with friends or show them to commercial clients to make a selection.
Please take Joannsover’s input to heart—she has nailed key issues that face serious photographers today—I could not have said it better:
“One of the most important things to do is embed metadata into all images you put online anywhere, especially those you submit to agencies. You do the work once and wherever the image goes, the metadata goes with it. In the multiple agency scenario, it is actively bad to add metadata on the site (or in this case in Backlight) because that information is not available when you put the image somewhere else later on (you can copy and paste, but that gets unreasonable as the collection size gets large).
Agencies and sites come and go; the images live a long time.
With keywords, for example, it can be hard to remember all the details accurately long after you initially took the image, so researching and entering those once, up front, is a win.”
Successfully locating images on the Internet depends heavily on metadata, and those who license images expect meaningful captions with them. In today’s world, most serious image-makers use robust programs like Photoshop or PhotoMechanic to add their metadata, and your software should be able to capture the basic information from these popular programs, with options to display this info in Backlight galleries. The most important fields are those displaying ownership info, caption/description info, keywords, and usage rights required by Google’s “Licensable” badge. Any program that is simple to use and supports these basic features should be successful.
Your advertising emphasizes Lightroom. I gave up on Lightroom years ago—it’s quirky and doesn’t fit my workflow. Photoshop’s Bridge contains many Lightroom features for making basic non-destructive aesthetic adjustments to images and is useful for adding most metadata. I gather that Backlight does not require Lightroom, which is good. Is your software fully compatible with sites created in WordPress?
I also noticed in your website samples that the image previews are enormous. Can the photographer choose the display size? 600px (long dimension) seems to be the norm on most sites, and large numbers of big images are slow to load. I re-size all of my images in PhotoMechanic, which is quick and easy to use, and add my own visible watermarks.
I am not a computer geek and know nothing about script, just a dedicated professional photographer who is struggling to keep my images relevant, displayable, searchable, and licensable in today’s world. I hope that this feedback is helpful and look forward to hearing more about your software and plans for the future. Backlight might be what I’m looking for.
Backlight can display a lot of metadata whether using Lightroom or another DAM
Photographers have a lot of control over image display size, from 512 px to 4096px
Backlight can be integrated with WordPress using just the album set and album creation features. Backlight albums can also be inserted into WordPress posts via shortcode if the photographer is also using the Backlight WordPress add-on, which creates a WordPress theme.
Rod, as an outsider, I don’t fully understand your “token system.” Can I assume that Backlight cannot auto-harvest captions from images with pre-existing Description/Caption info that I’ve embedded in Photoshop or Bridge?
Perhaps I can answer your question by explaining my site’s setup. I use Backlight’s Publisher module to upload my images to my site (I use Capture One, not Lightroom, so this workflow suits me).
All my images are given keywords, title, etc. in Photoshop and the metadata is read by Backlight so that search can work on the site - using my keywords. It also (as of Backlight 4) allows me to display some of the metadata on the image page.
I have my title & description, keywords, copyright notice and pixel dimensions shown for each image.
You can see an example of this here - all this information was read from my JPEGs, not entered as part of Backlight’s admin interface
Does that answer your question?
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Metadata tokens are simply a way to designate what metadata is displayed.
We did make some changes in Backlight 4.1 to automatically include some extra metadata in the Backlight-generated renditions. I can look at adding further metadata in this process such as captions and keywords.
Creating renditions from master images causes all metadata to be lost as the process converts JPEG to bitmaps, resizes the bitmaps and creates new JPEGs. So any metadata retained needs to be explicitly coded in. There are limitations to what we can write in as we don’t have full support to write to all EXIF, IPTC and XMP sections of JPEGs, so we may not be able to write some pieces of metadata if they belong in a section of the JPEG that we can’t write to.
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Joannsnover & Ben – thank you for helping to clarify things. To help pinpoint possible compatibility issues, I’ll explain my workflow.
- I download photos from my camera data cards using Adobe’s Photo Downloader. During every download, I convert my Camera Raw files to Adobe Camera Raw/DNG files, create an appropriately named folder on my hard drive to store the images, add a meaningful file name to every image, add my Copyright Contact Info, and fill the Copyright info URL field with a link to my license info—now required by Google for their licensing badge. This is all done automatically in one smooth operation.
- After sorting, adjusting, and rating the photos in Bridge, I create a “Best of” folder and assign permanent ID codes to these images, e.g. TAW-6244_petrified-wood-AZ.dng. I’m using PS CS6 for most of my work.
- By selecting groups of similar images in Bridge, I can right click on the selected photos, choose File Info, and add a Description/Caption and Keywords.
- Using PhotoMechanic, I can quickly downsize my DNG, PSD, or TIFF masters to JPEGs of the appropriate size (600px) and add visible watermarks for a website gallery. I would be uploading image files to the gallery from my desktop. My website is in WordPress, with no image gallery at this time.
In summary, Backlight would need to
A) Be fully compatible with my Wordpress site. It’s not clear to me how effective and trouble-free your WP module would be since your software isn’t designed to support WP. I been down many tortuous trails with other software and need to avoid another misadventure.
B) Auto-extract information from and display FOUR critical metadata fields that I’ve completed using Bridge & Photoshop: Copyright Field; Description/Caption Field; Keywords Field; and Copyright Info URL field. I don’t believe that any others are required by Google for their licensing badge.
Question: If I were to supply Backlight with JPEGs that need no downsizing (except for thumbnails), could we avoid creating new bitmapped JPEGS with stripped-out metadata?
The WordPress module only creates a WordPress theme. You can use it to make the design of your WordPress site or blog match that of your Backlight album sets and albums.
You would also need it if you planned on embedding Backlight albums into WordPress posts.
Otherwise, Backlight album sets and albums stand apart, and are independent from Wordpress
That’s right. Images that do not need resizing are copied exactly from the file you’ve uploaded. To do that, set the rendition size to be equal to or larger than the photos being uploaded. Here’s an example of images generated by Backlight, with the master image being the one that was uploaded. I had set the rendition sizes for photos and photos-for-download to be larger than the uploaded file. The identical hashes shows that the master, photos and photos-for-download are identical:
MD5 (./master/FAST0A8TK7218-FAST455747754.jpeg) = e824c97df15283868075290359d238e1
MD5 (./photos/FAST0A8TK7218-FAST455747754.jpeg) = e824c97df15283868075290359d238e1
MD5 (./photos-for-download/FAST0A8TK7218-FAST455747754.jpeg) = e824c97df15283868075290359d238e1
MD5 (./thumbnails/FAST0A8TK7218-FAST455747754.jpeg) = 1f577a43a472a78048a2ccf8eb5bcb82
That’s good news Ben, but remember, I know nothing about programming and the example you’ve given is “Greek to me.” 
It’s not programming. It’s a tool to provide a fingerprint that uniquely identifies the contents of files. Files that produce the same fingerprint are deemed to be identical.
Legacy, perhaps. We originally created Lightroom plugins, but that was long ago. Backlight is now a fully standalone web application, for which we offer an optional Lightroom Publisher Services plugin. I myself use Capture One Pro to process and export my images, then upload to Backlight via web-browser.
We’ve been working to deemphasize Lightroom for years now, but it’s been difficult to shake the legacy connections to that software.
Backlight stands apart from Wordpress. You can run the two things in parallel, but they don’t talk to each other. We offer an add-on for Backlight that will spit out a basic Wordpress theme, based on the templates you’ve created for your Backlight pages. This allows your Backlight pages, albums, etc. and your Wordpress site to share a visual identity, but that is the full extent of the integration between the two platforms. They do not and can not share data. For example, a search within your Backlight site will not surface blog posts in your Wordpress site. Similarly, a search in your Wordpress site would not surface images in your Backlight albums. You’d need to run the same search in both places.
So, Backlight is “fully compatible” with sites created in Wordpress, insofar as Backlight does not care about your Wordpress site; and Backlight shouldn’t interfere with a Wordpress site, unless you’ve done messy things with the folders on your server. That would be pilot error.
As has been explained above, you can choose your own sizes within a range. 600px, though, is ludicrously small for the modern web, in my opinion. On Apple’s Retina displays – which offer a 2x density factor – that means your image would be ideally displayed at only 300px on the long edge. Displayed any larger than that, the image would begin to look “enlarged” and blurry, like when you print an image at 200% it’s actual size. Many phones, including recent iPhones, now have an even greater density factor, and so do the vast majority of modern desktop displays.
So, the images in our demos are large, because we don’t want people on Macbooks to think that Backlight chews on images before spitting them back out for public consumption.
Tokens are used to govern which metadata is displayed on the page. For example, let’s say that your image contains its capture date, as well as a caption in its metadata.
You could then combine tokens such that both the capture date and caption metadata would be displayed for the slideshow caption, as is the case in this gallery on my own site:
In my album template, the tokens that populate the slideshow caption are:
{Month} {DD}, {YYYY}. {Caption}
That combination of date tokens allows me to format my dates have the full name of the month, the date as two digits (01, rather than 1), and the year as four digits, followed by whatever the image contains as caption. If I would prefer to format my dates as Oct. 2, '21 or 2012-02-10, then I would use a different combination of tokens.
Thank you for taking the time to write a detailed response, Matthew. -tom