Protecting Your Photos

Seeing as my last post was about image theft, I thought it would be fitting to share with you how best to protect your photos online. There is always a risk that someone is going to take them without permission and we all think it won’t happen to us, believe me I thought that too and look what happened! Copyright infringement is illegal, and when someone takes your photo then you can, of course, pursue it through the legal system. However, this is incredibly time-consuming to do, and you can never guarantee success.

Prevention is much better than cure, so by sharing these little tips I hope to give you some of the best ways to prevent your images from being ‘stolen’.

1) Adding a Watermark:

This is the most obvious way to deter casual image theft. Adding a small section of text, or a logo, to the corner of a photo is a great way to show ownership of your photos. I do this with all of my photos that appear on social media, you may have noticed that I add my initials to the corner of each image, and it does work to prevent a lot of opportunistic copyright infringement. For example, someone looking to include a photo in a presentation or webpage is likely to ignore those with watermarks. They probably don’t want a specific image, and will keep searching online until they find an appropriate choice with no watermark.

I add my logo to images using Photoshop, it’s important to make sure the watermark isn’t too intrusive or distracting. It is best not to stamp your name all over your photo, instead, do something subtle and neat. Reducing the opacity also helps to improve the negative effect it can have on the appearance of your photo.

2) Do Not Share a High Resolution File:

Uploading high resolution files online to display is a really bad idea, should someone get hold of this file, they can pretty much do what they want with it. It also makes it harder to prove you’re the original photographer, as they have the same file that you have be using to prove you took the photo.

I won’t upload a photo at more than 1600px online. This is enough to provide your audience with a good viewing experience of the image, but isn’t good enough for printing reproductions. The best way to adjust your image size is in a program like Photoshop, and this can be done in batches to save yourself some time. 

3) Compress Your Photos Before Uploading Them:

As well as uploading low resolution files, you will also need to compress them, this reduces the quality rather than the actual dimensions of the image. Again Photoshop is great for this: Head to the “File > Export” menu. Here you can “Save for Web…” I usually export a photo at 60% JPEG quality and this still looks really good for viewing online. Before exporting you can see in the preview that there’s not much difference between that and 90%. It’s a clever way of creating smaller, more compressed files that further reduce what someone could do with your image should they get hold of it.

4) Metadata - Add your Copyright:

By modifying the metadata you can embed your copyright information straight into the image before upload. I tend to use Lightroom for this as it easy to view and change the information all in one panel (as shown above). You can also do this in Photoshop if you prefer, by navigating to “File > File Info…” and adjusting it there.

Unfortunately this isn’t the most effective way, because after all it’s not noticeable unless you dig into a file’s metadata. Most websites like Facebook also strip the metadata from the file to compress it, and saving a photo for web, as outlined in 4, will also strip this metadata unless you have specified otherwise in the options.

5) Read the Terms and Conditions of Websites Before You Choose to Upload:

I know this is the part that most people gloss over because they don’t want to sit reading through pages and pages of conditions. But when it comes to sharing your photos online, it’s really important! 

Image sharing websites like Flickr, allow you to submit your photos under a ‘Creative Commons License’, which grants a certain number of rights, but you can’t revoke the license if you change your mind. Before signing up, make sure this option isn’t already enabled, and choose ‘All Rights Reserved’.