pet peeve - lose the watermark!

[lewinp]

Is anyone as tired as I am of seeing otherwise gorgeous shots ruined with a gigantic watermark right in the center of the image?

For heaven's sake, don't put them on the internet to share if you are afraid of someone stealing them. Do you understand image resolution and that its not possible to use a web quality image for many commercial applications?

In my opinion, people who do this do more harm than good by masking the image and showing distrust for the world. Do you really think you would make any money for a photo from the type of people who would otherwise steal it for their own use?

Your thoughts welcome, I've personally stopped viewing galleries that do this.

[amoxtli]

I agree with you. If I can see the watermark on the thumbnail I usually don't bother looking at the image.

On a more positive note, I have written to several photographers that I thought that they were marring their images with their watermarks and they ended up removing the watermarks.

Another pet peeve, people who post tiny images, because they think posting anything larger than 300 pixels per side will end up being used commercially.

[sheila]

As a professional photographer who sells images via my website, embedding watermarks is absolutely essential. Early on in the piece, I placed inobtrusive watermarks at the bottom of my images only to find them cropped and placed on numerous websites and blogs. While I do not have a problem with blogs per se, I do have a problem with folk lifting my images for commercial use and/or passing off. If you think that low resolution will stop theft, you are sadly mistaken I'm afraid! Through TinEye, I found that one of my images (low res and watermarked) was lifted, cropped and was appearing on a book cover. That is not unusual by any means. Eventually the publisher paid up (including damages).

Regarding blogs, through TinEye, I have found 39 Islamic blogs publishing an image of a young woman dressed in a hijab. As I said, I don't have a real problem with blogs as in my opinion, 99% are not commercial use. But I draw the line at commercial use of my work. There is also a Hungarian website which has 40 of my images on their site which they are selling as postcards These images are not watermarked because I did not watermark at the time I uploaded them. I am in the process of instigating a DMCA takedown notice on their server.

I don't like watermarking my work but I really need to stop theft, or at least deter those who think that everything on the Net is free for the taking.

Sheila

[jimcritchley]

Sheila, do you apply your watermarks before you place them on pbase? Also, I read something somewhere about tineye. Is there a link or some more info on it, many thanks.

[dandbphoto]

Yeah - what Sheila said - if you make part or all of your income from selling the prints, you either watermark or figure on losing out on over half your sales...

Dwight

[akmc_in_au]

I read something somewhere about tineye. Is there a link

http://www.tineye.com/

or some more info on it

http://www.tineye.com/about

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching.

TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 1,402,265,835 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for.

[sheila]

Sheila, do you apply your watermarks before you place them on pbase? Also, I read something somewhere about tineye. Is there a link or some more info on it, many thanks.

Hi Jim

I run an action on each image (resizing, watermarking and converting the colour profile to sRG for web use) in CS4 before uploading them. Its part of my workflow. TinEye is an excellent resource for photographers (both serious amateurs and pros) to find images online which infringe copyright. It only indexes 1.3 billion websites to date but they are building it slowly. All I do is rightclick on my images on PBase which automatically sends it to TineEye (you have to download their free program to do this). Here is a TinEye link to the image of a young woman in hijab which is on at least 39 blogs..and counting. I am not sure if you can open link. Perhaps someone can let me know if it works.

http://www.tineye.com/search/e46b8db457 ... fd2e9837ee


Cheers
Sheila

[waggonerphotos]

Works just as it should. Best Wishes - Bob

[septembermorn]

I do not have a watermark on my photos, but I have had my photos stolen (some were one of a kind, too) and used in publications and advertisement. Burns me up.