Before Publishing: Metadata, Rights Line, Size and Format

Your image is chosen, licensed, captioned and alt-texted. Three more jobs before it goes out: clean out the hidden data, put your rights line on it, and export it at a size that does not punish people on a phone.

Strip the metadata

A photo file carries more than the picture. Phones and cameras write metadata into it, usually in a format called EXIF: the date and time, the phone or camera model, lens settings, and often the GPS coordinates of where you stood when you pressed the shutter.

For a picture of a guardrail, that is harmless. For a photo you took from your kitchen window, or a photo a source sent you from their backyard, it can put a home address on the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has written about a case where coordinates embedded in a posted photo helped the FBI place it at a specific house. Camera metadata can also include a serial number that ties several photos to the same device.

Some big social platforms strip location data when you upload. Do not rely on it. Your own website, newsletter attachments, cloud-share links and emailed files may keep every byte. Clean the file once, before it leaves your hands.

How to do it

AVPrep has an Images tab that strips metadata from image files in your browser. Run your finished images through it as the last step before upload, and keep the original files (with metadata) in your private archive. The originals are your proof of when and where you shot something, should anyone ask.

You can also stop location from being recorded in the first place, or leave it out when sharing:

• iPhone: Apple's Personal Safety guide shows how to share without location: in the Share Sheet, tap Options and turn off Location. To stop the camera recording it at all, set Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, Camera to Never. You can also remove a location from a single photo with Adjust Location, No Location.
• Android: camera apps vary by maker. On Google Pixel phones, the Pixel Camera help pages describe a setting to turn saving location on or off. Look in your camera app's settings for a location or geotag option.

Settings menus move between software versions (these were checked as of October 2026). Whatever your phone does, stripping in AVPrep before upload is your backstop.

Screenshots carry less metadata than camera photos, but they can include the device and time. Run them through too. It costs a few seconds.

Add a rights and attribution line

Images travel without their articles. Someone screenshots your chart, posts it, and it gets shared 3,000 times with no link back to you. A small line on the image itself keeps your name and your terms attached.

The rules for placing it:

• Small. Readable if you look for it, invisible if you don't. On a 1600-pixel-wide image, text around 14 to 18 pixels tall usually works.
• About 50 percent opacity. Semi-transparent white or black, whichever reads against that corner. The picture should show through.
• In a lower corner. Bottom right is the usual spot. Keep it off faces, documents' key numbers and anything the image exists to show.
• Clear of cropping zones. Leave a margin from the edge so platforms that trim a few pixels do not cut it.

Write the line for the kind of work. For your own published civic work, where you want sharing to happen, something like:

© 2026 Your Name / Sharing and reposting permitted if the image remains unaltered and attribution is retained. Commercial use requires written permission.

For work you do not want spread at all (unreleased material, something for one recipient), use a stricter line:

© 2026 Your Name. All rights reserved. No reproduction, distribution, or public posting without written permission.

Use the current year. Old templates love to carry last year's date. Add your site's address if there is room. On AI illustrations, add "AI illustration" to the same corner, as lesson 4 explains.

A rights line on an image you licensed from someone else should credit them. Do not stamp your copyright on a CC BY photo you did not take. Put their TASL credit in the caption and leave their image clean, or add a small credit line with their name.

Pick the format

JPG, PNG and WebP cover almost everything. MDN's image format guide and Google's web.dev guide agree on the basics:

MDN reports lossy WebP files average 25 to 35 percent smaller than comparable JPEGs, and lossless WebP about 26 percent smaller than PNG. If your site and your newsletter platform accept WebP, use it. Some email programs and older platforms still choke on it, so keep a JPG or PNG copy for those.

The one mistake to never make: saving a chart or a document screenshot as a low-quality JPG. Lossy compression smears sharp text edges into a fuzzy halo. Charts and text go PNG or lossless WebP.

Size it for the screen

A modern phone photo can be 4000 pixels wide and 3 to 8 MB. A typical article column displays around 700 to 900 pixels wide. Uploading the original makes every reader download several times more image than they can see, and on a rural cell signal the page may never finish loading.

A workable target for article images:

• Width: about twice the display width, so around 1600 pixels for a standard article image. That covers high-density phone screens. Full-width headers can go to about 2000 to 2400.
• File size: a few hundred kilobytes for most photos. Under 500 KB is a good habit; under 200 KB is better when it still looks clean.
• Quality: for JPG and lossy WebP, test a few quality settings and pick the lowest that still looks right at normal viewing size. Somewhere in the 70s to mid 80s on a 100-point scale often works, but trust your eyes over the number.

Social platforms resize and recompress whatever you upload, with their own size rules that change often. Export at the shape the platform wants (the square, vertical and wide sizes from lesson 4) and let them do the rest.