Tuesday tips 4: Protecting your photos online

This week’s tip is not about taking photos but how to look after them if you share them online.

Whenever you post your photos on the Internet, it’s very easy for someone to cut and paste them and use them elsewhere.  They shouldn’t because every photograph you take is your copyright* so they should ask permission from you first and you’re entitled to claim payment if you wish.  (It can be more complicated than that – e.g. if your picture features a person or building, you may need a “model release” or “property release” permitting you to sell that image.  There’s plenty of advice on the Internet so if you are thinking about selling your images, read around the subject as rules vary depending on the country you took the photo in, whether you were on private property at the time, what the photo is going to be used for, and so on.)

Unfortunately, not everyone understands the rules of copyright and many think that any photo on the Internet is fair game.  I have had my photos ripped off in the past but a polite email asking them to remove it or I will invoice them usually works.

So how do you stop people stealing your photos?  There isn’t a simple way other than not sharing the digital files in the first place, which isn’t practical if you’re sharing them to promote your business or want a quick  way to show the pictures of your children to great aunt Agatha on the other side of the world, for instance.  But you can do two things to act as a deterrent:

• Watermark your images – i.e. add a logo and/or copyright notice on them.  You’ll see all the photos on my blog are watermarked.  It acts as a visible reminder that the photo is owned by me.  You can use photo editing software to add the text, or there are specialist pieces of software such as Blogstomp, which allow you to automatically add a logo or copyright notice, as well as resize them for the web, etc, so if you post lots of photos online, it’s worth investigating.  Watermarks can be edited out or cropped off  but they should deter the casual photo “borrower”.
• Add your copyright information to the image’s metadata – Every original image file contains a  set of extended information that contains details such as the width and height and the camera settings.  You can see some of this information if you look at the “File properties” in Windows Explorer or “Get info” in Finder if you’ve got a Mac.  Unfortunately, Finder doesn’t  display the copyright information but software such as Photoshop does allow you to display this and set it too, so you can put your name and contact details in the copyright section.  But the easiest way is to get your camera to do this for you – check your camera manual to see if you can set this information somewhere in the menus so the camera will automatically add it to every photo you take.    The bad news is some websites strip this information off when you upload the images and again, there’s nothing to stop someone manually removing it from a file too.

There’s a third option too – signing up for digital watermark software that embeds a code in your image that doesn’t affect how it displays but can’t be removed.  That’s going to cost you though – and for the amount of images I produce, it’s something I can’t currently afford without putting my prices up significantly.

Which is why there’s been an outcry this month from professional photographers as the UK parliament passed the Enterprise & Regulatory Reform Bill at the end of April and it includes a clause that allows anyone to use an orphan image – in other words one where they can’t find the original author – after a “diligent search”.  The problem is what constitutes a diligent search?  Because it’s so easy to strip off any copyright details, the risk is that someone could claim that they did a search for the owner, failed to find them and so use the image for free.  We may have to register our photos to claim copyright, which is extra admin and potentially an extra fee to pay so that’s bad news for photo buyers and photographers alike.  The exact details are still vague at the moment and the bill won’t become law for several months so I’m sure we’ll see clarification on this soon but, in the meantime, I’m being more diligent about making sure my public photos are watermarked and have full copyright information inside, and I suggest you do too.

* unless you took the photo on behalf of your employer, in which case the copyright belongs to them.