This free Adobe app protects the reliability of your photos. I’m everything about it

Almost ten years ago, I was sitting in a cafe in Berlin. A flyer from a local music festival caught my eye. It wasn’t the lineup that caught my attention, but rather a photo of a bell tent decorated with fairy lights selling people with expensive glamping offerings.

I quickly learned that it was a false ad. how? Because the photo was mine.

I took photos not at festivals but at a small family-owned campsite on the northeast coast of England, not at a German campsite. I posted a photo on the travel blog I ran at the time. It went to Pinterest and from there to a cafe in Berlin.

Here and now, the creative work we put online is at risk more than ever – not just from simple theft, Training AI It is increasingly dominating our world. This is why Adobe, which is used by many artistic media creators, has invested so much in providing people with a way to retain ownership of their work, even if it is published online all over the world.

At the Adobe Max Creativity Conference in London on Thursday, the company announced it had Content Authenticity app releasedthe beginning It was announced in OctoberFor anyone to download. This app allows you to attach digital watermarked works to creative works that link to names and public profiles. Importantly, you can say that if you don’t want to use your content to train your AI.

Free tools to protect your work

It’s clear that Adobe thinks it’s as much as it wants to protect its customers’ jobs. Adobe’s content reliability standards are already attached to work created using the platform, so this standalone app doesn’t boost your own business. Importantly, unlike almost all other Adobe tools, you don’t need a creative cloud account to download the app. It’s free.

“It’s really for everyone,” said Andy Parsons, senior director of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative in an interview. “Everyone needs to have that last mile ability to belong to their work.”

Parsons showed how you can see the authenticity signature of the content of photos posted to Instagram via a browser plugin. Previously, this was something only an expert could do with his image, but now options are open for everyone to use. And I firmly believe that they should. I know I’ll do that.

I don’t consider myself a content creator, but I publish photos taken on CNET and regularly post them on public Instagram. I had already taken photos and used them for commercial purposes. If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. The idea that my photos and videos are used to train AI is even less.

We spoke with Adobe Max creators and found real excitement about the content Authenticity app.

“Discoverability is the way people like me get jobs,” said John Devo, photographer, author and content creator. He shares more comfortably when he can be able to link his best works to him on the internet, even if he is picked up on an aggregator account.

“I’ve created something over the last five, six years, because if you pick it up and people like it, if you share it, it’s never going to lead to me,” he said. “I already have a bank of content that I can start sharing when these things become ubiquitous, and that’s what makes it a game-changing thing for me.”

Devo feels encouraged by the fact that Adobe has partnered with other major tech companies to create content qualification standards. Open standards are key to widespread recruitment, says Parsons. More and more, it is being burned directly into our technology. Samsung Galaxy S25. But for the rest of us who don’t have content credentials ready to go to our phones, there’s a new app.

For me, and for content creators like Devo, the stakes feel higher than ever, but not everyone is convinced that the protection provided by content belongings is necessary. I asked Parsons what he said to persuade someone to download the app.

“The world is changing very rapidly,” he said. “It’s definitely true that you want to attach certain expressions to your content.”

“Instead of saying that, why do you do that? What about my question?”