Students to give Google free photos for Google+ Adverts.

A few days ago we received an anonymous notice about a Google competition entitled the Google Photography Prize. This competition is open to students aged 18 years or older in higher education from around the world, excepting a few places such as North Korea. Students are to share up to eight of their best shots and upload them to a public Google+ album. The primary aim of this new Google competition is to increase the number of Google+ users by encouraging young students to sign up for Google+. This is all fine so far and if it also encourages young people to be creative through photography we welcome that.

Since the launch of Google+ there has been much chatter in blogs and forums about how friendly Google+ is to photographers. In our view one of the friendliest acts that Google+ could do would be to ensure that images uploaded and displayed on that service would retain their image metadata. We had a look at the Controlled Vocabulary survey to see if anyone had investigated what Google+ did with metadata. No one had, so we decided to look into this and create an entry in the survey for Google+.

NB! Since writing this story Google+ have changed how they handle metadata and now preserve copyright metadata in all images displayed on Google+ pages. Read our story for the latest news.

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