Protect your photos online

Recently I had the unpleasant experience of discovering that some of my photos had been used by a third party without my permission.

I’d submitted the pictures to an online collaborative photo project and an organisation who’d seen them thought they’d make rather good material for a public exhibition they were working on.

It wasn’t just my pictures that were involved. They used images from many other photographers who had contributed to the project and collectively expressed their dismay at what had occurred and proceeded to take legal advice as to how they might seek recompense.

Once someone has infringed your copyright the usual course of action is to bring it to their attention, ask them to stop and seek compensation for their unauthorised use of your images.

This has the potential to turn into a protracted and possibly costly process, so it makes sense to do whatever you can to prevent it happening in the first place.

This month I’ll be looking at what practical steps you can take to protect your online photos from copyright infringement.

Visible watermarking
The most obvious way to both send a signal to potential infringers and render your photos unusable is to add a visible watermark.

The big drawback is, of course, that watermarks are quite intrusive – the device you use to mark your ownership of an image and prevent others using it is a big aesthetic distraction.

All you can do about this is to try to strike a balance between intrusiveness and legibility.

This is usually done by making your watermark semi-transparent and sizing and positioning it so that it’s big and central enough to do its job without getting in the way too much.

If you do a Google search for photo watermarking you’ll find a multitude of watermarking programs, but it’s so easy to do in any photo-editing program that they’re really not worth bothering with.

If your editor supports batch processi ng you can write a script that will watermark a folder of photos with next to no effort.