If, like me you post images to facebook or have clients (or indeed other people) post your images to facebook, here is a neat little tip for how to get an automatic link back to your main site generated.
Whenever an image is posted to facebook, it automtically creates a description from the IPTC Copyright field in the meta data encoded into the image. I’ve been using this field for a long time to assert my copyright over the images I make. When I noticed facebook was reading this field I tried a couple of experiments whereby I incorporated my web address, http://gavinthorn.com into this field and sure enough, when an image was uploaded Facebook generated a link back to my website.
The best part is that nowadays I don’t even need to think about it. Using Lightroom I use a metadata template to fill out all sorts of fields for every image I download from a flash card. One of those fields is the copyright field with my standard copyright text, the year and my web address.
To implement it, the only investment of time is setting up the template which is about a 2 minute job. After that, sit back and enjoy all your new inbound links.
There is one issue though, the link can be removed but I find that most people won’t touch copyright text.
