Online image theft has become a major issue over the past few years as more and more businesses take to Facebook and Twitter to promote themselves. Time and again I have seen companies targeted by people who have set up as a competitor by stealing photos of the original company’s products and passing them off as their own! Several clients have recently asked “How to Watermark Photos”.
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Most of the time this is happening it is simply because there is not watermark on the photo, and so “no way” to prove who owns it. How to watermark photos is very simple, and in my opinion a must if you are planning on using them on social media.
Using images within your own site is not so much of a problem. If you talk to your web developer, they will be able to tell you that there are ways of stopping people downloading the images (right hand click on any Flickr image to see an example of this).
How to Watermark Photos?
There are a few ways of watermarking your photos.
- When you take photos of your products, put a business card next to it. This is a great, and simple way to copyright your pictures, as it’s much harder to edit out a business card (especially if it’s leaning against the product) than editing out a watermark.
- Super imposing a watermark onto the photo after taking it. To do this you will require some photo editing software – GIMP is a great open source tool which does what you will need. If you search in YouTube for How to Watermark Photos in GIMP you will find a lot of tutorials that can help you.
How can I find out if someone has already stolen my images?
If you are worried that someone has stolen your images, you can do a few checks. The first one is by using the Google image search: you can drag and drop your image into the search bar. It will find any image that it considers to be similar. If you see your image listed here, you can click-through to the source of it, and see where it is coming from.
If you think someone may have stolen an image from your website, you may be able to see this in your website statistics. You will need to look for “referrers”. If you see a web address you do not recognise in this list, it may be that they have embedded an image directly from your site – which is not only theft of your photo, but will also be using up your bandwidth, with no benefit to you! If you come across something like this, the best thing to do is to email the website owner to make them aware of the issue, and ask them to remove it.
What if the person who has stolen my photo won’t remove it?
The only thing I can suggest here is to get a lawyer involved. I have seen on Facebook a number of times that businesses will band together to get a page taken down if they have stolen images from a number of different people, but if you feel it is effecting your business in a negative way, either by giving you a bad reputation, or by making you loose customers, then the only thing to do is to get legal advice.
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