I lead platform work at Creative Commons. As part of that work, we are exploring the potential of a standard field in EXIF that could make attribution and license info more sticky across the web. We are currently in the research phase -- talking to major image hosting platforms (and platforms that read and ingest images) about what kinds of image metadata they read and retain. Zhou and his engineering team at Wikimedia directed me to this list as I am seeking feedback from the Wikimedia community.

Ultimately, we want to make it easier for platforms to display provenance and license info -- increase the likelihood that when a user lands on an image, they know who created it and what license to use it under. For example, images from Wikimedia Commons may get tweeted, but the image metadata is not retained in tweets. How can we work with platforms to use the same metadata standard so that info can be retained across them?

Since we are just in the research phase now, I welcome your thoughts on Wikimedia Commons' and Wikipedia's own uses of image metadata. Specifically:

1. The most common image metadata standards we know about are EXIF and XMP. Which does Wikimedia primarily read and retain? Are there others that are more widely used?
2. Which standard does Wikimedia prefer? What would be easiest to implement? for Wikimedia, but also for the platforms that Wikimedia interfaces with. Aka, what are the pros and cons of each?

Best,

Jane