Image piracy has always been a major problem on the web. But a smart new tool called Exif — no, not that EXIF, which stands for Exchangeable Image File and refers to the data that gets embedded into an image — aims to solve it by borrowing the sharing behavior popularized by video services like YouTube and Vimeo.

Photographers who want to share their images typically have to hope other people won’t reuse those photos without credit or be vigilant in making sure that doesn’t happen. They can watermark their images, but they aren’t 100 percent foolproof. The result of all this is that the path to getting recognized or even paid for your work as a photographer is fraught with challenges.

Exif applies an embedding-as-sharing model to photography. Upload your photos to Exif and it will generate HTML-based embed codes that websites can use to put your photos in a post. It replaces the standard way of doing things, which usually requires someone who works for said website to download that photo and upload it to their own hosting service or CMS. These steps sometimes strip out the image’s metadata, and they also introduce break points in the process where that person’s carelessness could mean the photographer never receives (or has to fight for) proper credit and compensation.

Each embed also includes links or credit and location info

Exif is more than just a new way of sourcing images to include in posts, though. A photo embedded using Exif is also interactive — a small “i” button appears when you hover over an Exif image, and clicking that brings up things like the photographer’s name and website, where the photo was taken, or the name of the art director on the shoot.

Photographers can also track views or outright block certain sites from embedding their images. It doesn’t come with any ugly containers around the photo, and it doesn’t seem to bog down webpages either. Exif is light, clean, and almost indistinguishable from the way images usually work.

That is, until you try to steal an Exif image. Go ahead and try it on the ones embedded in this post. Click-and-drag, right click, screenshot — whatever you do will cause a black box with a link to the photographer’s Exif.co page to pop up. (Exif calls these “smart watermarks.”) It’s a brute force solution — that box even shows up temporarily if you just accidentally tap the command button, for instance — but it appears to be an effective one.

Exif’s big hurdles are that it’s not free (the price scales up the more views your photo gets) and that existing web infrastructure and habits are firmly built around websites using images that they themselves host. It’s also not going to stop piracy on social media. And there are other questions that need to be answered, too — for example, does it harm discovery through search in any way? But it’s a clever enough idea that it could help mitigate image piracy in some parts of the web, even if it doesn’t solve the problem outright.