We’re pleased to announce a user-friendly installer for our software to examine Creative Commons licensing from inside Adobe applications like Photoshop. Furthermore, the licensing metadata that you see in Photoshop is interoperable with other metadata packages in Free Software like Exempi.

A week ago I took this picture of our lovely web engineer Nathan Kinkade along with our community manager, Jon Phillips. After opening it in Adobe Photoshop and tagging it with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, I clicked on “File Info” from the File menu. Here’s what that looks like:

We’ve always said that the Creative Commons licenses come in three forms: lawyer-readable, human-readable, and machine-readable. Metadata is the “information about information” that allows software to tell you more about the file you are examining.

This file info panel is possible because Adobe published an Extensible Metadata Platform (“XMP”) standard as well as Freely-licensed software that implements the platform in addition to supporting it in their own applications. To get started displaying CC metadata in the Adobe programs that support it, simply install our panel (available for both Windows and Mac, the two Adobe-supported platforms). If you want to mark a work as licensed under a CC license, simply choose a license and select the option labeled “To mark a PDF or other XMP-supported file, save this template”. Open that with the Adobe program and your file is marked. We had written about the panel before; this refresh provides an easy installer as well updates it for changes to our metadata namespace.

And remember that this metadata standard is cross-platform. We’ve written before about other people including XMP support in pdflatex, PHP, PDF files, and Tracker, just to name a few examples of Free Software support for XMP.