Saturday, September 5, 2009

A Big Game Safari of a Different Sort


In a post titled "Tracking the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Photographer" on the Photo District News (PDN) blog, Daryl Lang details the steps he took to track down the origin of the photo of the big kitty on the cover of the new Apple OS X release.

In brief they were:

Step one: Poke around on the Internet.
Step two: Tineye.
Step three: Twitter.
Step four: Ask Apple.
Step five: PACA OrphanSearch.

David Sanger points out in a reply, the obvious step they missed -- checking to see if there was any metadata in the image itself, since there is a version of the cover image distributed with the new OS. In this particular instance a search would have also resulted in a "fail" as well. However, anyone that followed the results of our SAA "Meta Survey" of stock image distributors, would know that the image which Apple licensed from Corbis would have had this embedded information when it was licensed. So the real question is, at what step in the process was it removed and why?

Enquiring minds want to know and absent any answers, the hunt will have to continue.