Online platforms routinely strip metadata from images to protect user privacy – a necessary safeguard on the Web. However, this decontextualizes professional photojournalism, leaving viewers unable to verify a photo’s origin, time, or location. This creates a critical dilemma for photographers. They need a secure method to re-associate their work with this essential data, but require absolute control to do so.

They must be able to present this enriched, verifiable context only when they deem it safe, on platforms they trust – like their own website or a specific publication – to restore the full story behind the shot.

As often with Starling’s prototypes, the process begins at the moment of capture, where technical metadata like time and location are cryptographically signed, creating a tamper-evident record of rich, contextualizing metadata. This authenticated foundation still allows a photographer to later add richer contextual information – such as their byline, a narrative description, or related images.

Based on the Four Corners Project research and user interface, Starling Lab and Four Corners co-developed a WordPress plugin to bring this UI to the biggest blogging platform on the Web. This tool allows publishers to easily embed photos with an interactive layer, enabling viewers to explore the rich, attributable context and verify the circumstances of the photo’s origin.

As part of this work, Starling worked with the Four Corners team to develop a C2PA-compliant metadata schema for bundling rich contextual metadata in C2PA manifests. This schema contained all the metadata contained in each of the Four Corners toggles. This data is then included in a C2PA manifest, and parsed by the WordPress plugin, for presenting contextual and provenance information on each article.