Leica M11-P

Leica adds Content Credentials hardware to the M11-P for tracking the manipulation history of its images. Damien Demolder takes a look

- Damien Demolder

I suppose that if anyone was going to be the first to introduce a system that allowed the provenance of an image to be traced, right back to where it came from and to the original file, it would be Leica. In the new M11-P rangefinder we have just that, with the inclusion of Leica Content Credentials. The feature relies on a new hardware chip that encodes details of how each image was recorded and what it looked like, so it can be compared to future versions of itself. In theory, this will allow viewers of images to check what has been done to an image and for photographers to see when one of their images has been used and altered without permission. The idea is to give the public and commissioners more confidence that what they are looking at hasn’t been faked or manipulated beyond reason.

How does it work? Content Credentials isn’t just a Leica thing. It’s the beginning of a common provenance standard in a scheme that includes players such as Adobe, Microsoft and Nikon. When you switch the feature on from the menu, the camera records shooting data to a file that’s attached to the image, much in line with what’s recorded by regular EXIF data but with the chance to add the name of the photographer and the copyright holder. This file is then passed with the image to your editing application – such as Photoshop – which can then, if it is compatible with the Content Credentials system, add a record of all the changes made.