Photo Mechanic to Support C2PA, Giving Photographers Proof of Authorship

Photo Mechanic has been vital software in a press photographer’s toolkit for decades, but with the rise of AI, Camera Bits is now planning to add Content Authenticity support.

The announcement comes after a PetaPixel article written by editorial and commercial photographer Nick Didlick revealed that Photo Mechanic has a “tool in development” that will protect the C2PA signature, which ensures a photo’s provenance and may help protect photographers from accusations that a picture is fake.

“Maintaining a validated photo workflow is a challenge,” Didlick writes. “Photo Mechanic is proving to be a key component to this, with its ability to maintain and update a valid C2PA provenance chain from image capture to output, so that editors can validate a real image with confidence.”

Latching onto Didlick’s comments, Camera Bits, the company behind Photo Mechanic, explains that it anticipates Content Authenticity in Photo Mechanic will benefit photographers who want to demonstrate that their work originated in-camera; press outlets and wire services; photo contests and awards organizations; brands and agencies; and large organizations.

“Our goal is not to change how photographers work, but to make authenticity part of their normal workflow when they need it,” Camera Bits writes in a blog post.

The underlying technology is based on the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) standard. Camera Bits says that while C2PA is powerful, it is also technically complex.

“There are manifests, signatures, trust chains, cryptographic verification layers, and interoperability considerations,” the company says. “Working photographers should not need to understand all of that in order to use it.”

“At Camera Bits, our role is to translate that complexity into something practical, reliable, and fast, just like we’ve done for metadata workflows for decades,” it adds. “We are building the interface and workflow so that image provenance can be managed inside Photo Mechanic in a way that feels familiar and efficient.”

Still in Active Development

No doubt there are many working photographers who are keen to get their hands on this new feature but Camera Bits stresses that it is not yet in public beta and there’s no public release timeline as of February 2026.

This is in part because it is a brand new technology that requires clever engineering and patents. As Camera Bits founder Dennis Walker explains in his white paper, while apps like Photoshop hold a photo “captive”, making it easy to add the C2PA signature, metadata-editing software like Photo Mechanic does not have just one single chokepoint, making the process far more complex.

“The workflow and interface are still being refined in collaboration with members of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) as well as various professional photographers,” Camera Bits says.

“The C2PA SDK itself that will be used by Photo Mechanic is not yet final. It is an open-source project originated by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). The important thing to understand here is that C2PA defines the standards. CAI promotes and provides tools that implement those standards. As the SDK evolves, so will our implementation. We are building carefully and are meticulously reviewing new changes to the SDK before integrating them to ensure stability and long-term compatibility. We are still refining the final pieces of this puzzle, which are the all-important timestamps missing from most cameras that sign photos with C2PA. This is crucial in our opinion.”

When completed, the C2PA will work with any camera that supports the standard.

“Authenticity and verification are becoming part of the modern photographer’s professional toolkit,” Camera Bits says.

“We see this not as a replacement for trust in photographers, but as an additional layer of confidence in an environment where synthetic media is increasingly common.”

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.