How to Protect your Photos Online

Watermarking your photos

Placing a visible deterrent on your photos is probably the easiest way to deter the most basic instance of someone stealing your photos and images. This could be simply your name or your web address, basically stamping your ownership on the photo. Going back to before 2011, I never did this, that was until I found a company using my image without permission. So after that I placed my details on all my photos. I tried many versions of watermark and now I have the perfect version, which is via PhotoLogo. (Read my PhotoLogo Blog post here.)

As much as possible I try and maintain the logo so that it is not too much of a distraction from the main image. I also think, as well as it being a deterrent to image theft, I think it is a nice exercise in branding!

You can add a watermark in Photoshop very easily. I simply load my image, create a new layer and paste and transform the logo so it sits in a suitable position.

Only Upload Lower Quality Files

One trick you can use to deter commercial usage of your images is to only upload lower quality images, or images less than 1400 pixels. The problem is that if you upload a high quality image to your site or for example flickr, anyone who downloads this could actually us it for print etc. The image size I quote of 1400 pixels is what I regularly use, partly because my website maximum width is 1300 and I feel an extra 100 pixels will display is decent enough quality, yet, 1400 pixels is small enough to protect my images.

You can also compress the images, e.g. only upload images which have had 30-40% compression. Ideal for screen viewing and fast download, but useless if you want a high resolution image.

If you want to compress your images in photoshop, there is a great tool called Save for Web under the File menu. Export the file to about 60% quality and you should have a file size around 200-300Kb. This is good for websites but not so good if you want to download and manipulate the image.

What can you do if someone steals your photo online?

I have been in this situation. Someone is using your photo without permission. It is not a nice scenario to be in but having to write an email or letter asking them to stop using it or perhaps even pay you for the permission.

There are a few things you can do such as;

1. Contact the company hosting the images, e.g the hosting company will usually have an abuse@ email address or similar.
2. If it is Facebook or Twitter etc, these usually have standard forms you can complete to make a copyright abuse complaint.
3. You could write to the person who took the photo via their website or published email and ask them to stop using the image.
4. I have seen some photographers write a ‘Thank you for using my image’ letter accompanied by an invoice. (Money talks!)
5. If you really want the image removed you can contact a lawyer as a last resort. But this costs money so it is not for all.

Unless you are a professional the best you can do is to try steps 1 to 3 above. It may not always work but you need to protect the images you worked so hard to produce.