Content Credentials

December 2024

In the Fall of 2024 I incorporated Content Credentials metadata into my photography and into this website.

Content Credentials is a feature developed by Adobe as part of its Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) to enhance transparency, trust, and accountability in digital content creation. It embeds metadata into digital files, enabling creators to provide verifiable details about the content’s origin and edits.

Adobe

There a 2 significant features of content credentials that are of interest to me. The first is the ability to store copyright attribution information as part of the image. This is something that has been available in EXIF data previously but EXIF information is very easy to modify or completely remove. In fact many online services will strip EXIF information from your images as part of the image upload process. The other very interesting piece of information stored in the credential is what software was used in creating and editing the file, including whether Generative AI tools were used at any point.

In the context of this website this will let you know if a photograph that you’re looking at is a true photograph of a real scene or if it has been manipulated at all using generative AI.

Anything that you see on this website (outside of this page) is an original photograph taken by me with some form of camera. Some are originally from a digital camera, some were made on film and scanned but none have been edited using anything other than pretty basic image editing techniques: white balance, exposure, contrast, cropping, dust removal etc… In all cases I was standing there looking at the same thing that was photographed.

The Content Credential logo (above) is displayed underneath each image to the right and if you click on that logo a popup will appear displaying some high-level information specific to that individual image including whether generative AI tools were used to create or modify it.

While I don’t use any generative AI tools I was interested in understanding a bit more about what they’re capable of in the context of photography. It seemed like a good idea to start generating a content credential for every image I make and exposing some summary information about it on this site.

I write with some additional detail on how I figured out how this works and how to incorporate it into my workflow in my blog. Check it out here if you’re interested in more information.

Here are a couple of example pictures I put together using Photoshop that demonstrate a the different credential outputs. The first example doesn’t look realistic at all (nor was it meant to be). I think anyone looking at this would know that it’s fake. When I made the second example I was a bit perplexed though as it took all of 5 seconds to produce after feeding a <10 word prompt in Photoshop. I think that the result could easily be mistaken for a real scene. Images like this second example are one of many examples of where Content Credentials are useful out in the wilds of the internet.

Example 1

Example 2