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Getting exposure of your work without unauthorised hosting elsewhere

ted_smith

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Hi

About a year ago, I shut my website down for two reasons. A) annual hosting costs, but more critically B) my inability to prevent other sites hosting some of my pictures.

I had a range of fairly low res pictures that I'd had scanned over the years of my landscape shots mostly - landmark photos and such. Yet despite using a lot of the common tricks to prevent it and of course copyright notes on the site, I'd still find my pictures hosted elsewhere (by dragging and dropping onto Google images mostly); some with a link back to my own site but several with no such link.

So, due to the cost issues as well and the maintenance of updates and the fact that I don't really earn anything anyway, I pulled the plug on it. The old saying of "the best way to protect your images is to not put them on the Internet at all".

But now, a year later, I'm kind of regretting it. But I keep thinking why I shut it down in the first place...the fact that people kept using my pictures without consent (wallpaper sites being the worse culprits); I'll just have the same problem again, and I remember that something I read which was "the best way to protect your images is to not put them on the Internet"! So I took a look at some of my idols websites, like Michael Kenna. I notice he too has many 50-100Kb pictures on his site to showcase his work - entire galleries from all over the world, so I saved a couple and Google searched them, too. And I found that every site that contained a copy of his pictures was a "legit" site - i.e. one that was selling prints on his behalf, or publishers selling books and calendars on his behalf, and so on. No dodgy wallpaper hosting sites going on there and any generated revenues clearly ended up back with him.

So I'd like to ask how any of you get on with your websites? How do you strike the balance between ensuring you get exposure of your work, but without your work being taken away or watermarked so heavily it defeats the object of showing them at all? I realise nobody is able to make quality re-prints from a crumby 60Kb JPEG scan, but it's annoying when your work re-surfaces in places you don't want it to. I'm curious to know how Kenna seems not to have fallen victim to this with no obvious protection on his web pages against things like right click --> save as and so on, yet a middle of the road amateur like me found my pictures appearing on sites all over the world (more than half a dozen different ones).

What's your views on the subject?
 
I suspect his images have thousands of links, and the top links are his. In your case, there were probably 10s of links, making it easier to find those misused.

(A Google search for 'Michael Kenna images' brings up almost half a million results.)
 
The first time I posted a photograph on APUG within a few days it was copied several hundred times. After that I avoid posting photographs anywhere. You could put your name and copyright across the photograph so that it would not be sellable or saleable.
 
it seems to impossible to enforce copyright across international borders.
every country has their own rules, and requirements .. and a lot of people
in the usa are misinformed and don't understand that copyright doesn't exist
"as soon as your depress the shutter" or if you mail yourself copies of the images and don't open the envelope.
putting images on the internet makes them public .. i've had a website for more than 20 years
and there really isn't much one can do if someone borrows your work, unless it was hot linked
then you can change the url/name of the photograph ..
there are services like digimark ( i am sure there are others ) who for a fee will digitally watermark and
keep a watchful eye on the images you pay them to keep an eye on. stock agencies do this sort of thing
to make sure people don't borrow without compensation.
then again, as soon as the image is crawled on any website, it is archived in the wayback machine, not much one can do about that.
 
There isn't much that you can do about people downloading your images. If they can see it on their screen they can grab it. You can stop people from hot linking, at least my web provider (Stablehost) has that as an option, if you are concerned about the bandwidth. I signed up for unlimited bandwidth in case something crazy happens so I never have to worry about it. You can also get search engine robots to ignore the contents of your website If you search my name my website is top result in google, but not a single image is indexed as far as I can tell. In fact if you went scouring the internet for images of mine you may only be able to find the ones I post here.

The probable reason why Kenna doesn't have a lot of erroneous results in google is he more than likely has someone that monitors it and sends out a DMCA takedown notice. You can do the same if it bothers you that much and you have the time. Alternatively you can send people an invoice. They may laugh at it, they may take your image down or every now and then you may get paid. There are ways to collect across borders, but I am not going into that here, and it is almost never worth your time.

If you really want to get exposure to your work you need to do far more than put up a website. No one is going to come beating on your door. In this day and age that means Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler, etc. and promoting it on popular websites. If you don't do the work, no one will give a sh!t. You may even do the work and still no one will give a sh!t. Every now and then though the right person will, and you never know when that will happen. If you want to find the needle you need to start digging through the haystack.
 
that's how it works. live with it or grow taters (much easier to protect, a dog and some barbed wire will do)
 
This is pretty much why I stopped posting images online. Not that I don't appreciate that someone thought enough of the pics to steal the images, but still.....

Years ago I was talking w a LF shooter in my area that had some very nice work up in his home. He also had a good website that he had been posting images on for many years, w/ modest prices for prints. I asked him if he had ever sold anything from the website, and he said no, not a thing. Galleries or open studios (or even coffee houses) are where something usually sells. So I guess I'm saying that if you want exposure, get your website back up. If you want to sell something, the old traditional ways are still the best.

By the way, I went and googled the photographer that you mentioned, clicked on the first thing that came up, right clicked on the first pic, and it went right into my pictures. The file size was much larger than you mentioned. So I guess he doesn't mind all that, and he has no protections at all, at least that I saw. I deleted it, but you could make up a heck of a library doing this on different people on the web. Fortunately it has no appeal to me and they aren't mine anyway, but not everyone thinks like that. Which is why I stopped online posting. Why give the work away, even if it's small? It would be like a writer handing his manuscript to the publisher and saying, keep it, it's yours, I don't want anything for it. Value (dollars and cents) comes from scarcity. If everyone has it and can get it for free, then it's valueless. The air we breathe is abundant and free, but what happens if (when) it becomes scarce? We take a lot of things for granted.
 
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If you want exposure to show and sell you work open galleries in Aspen Colorado, Vail Colorado, Telluride Colorado, Steamboat Colorado, Sun Valley Idaho, Lake Tahoe, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Georgetown Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, London, Paris, Rome, ...
 
Thanks guys. Is as I suspected then. I think the point is valid that Kenna probably has one or two people working on his online prescence professionally.

Ha ha...I have only very few pictures that would ever be worthy of gallery viewing! That's the dream really, isn't it.
 
You can try to wrap your images in flash - not simple jpg --> it is harder to copy.

About copyright in different countries, here is one exaple: in former Yugoslavia every republic had different copy right laws: one republic had a law when you translate some book: translation itself is considered your own book, so no copyright right existed to original book - but your translation was copyrighted !
 
I spent virtually all of my working career in Publishing and have very strong views on the theft of intellectual property. The Internet has created a virtual inventory for people to rip off whatever they want and many governments encourage the theft of IP by default. If you don't want your work appropriated, don't put it on line.
 
There are companies who run web bots which check images for inclusion of your (non visible) personal digital watermark which they sell to you. They then notify you if they find your images published on any website except your own. Photoshop has built in digimarc add watermark functionality you can use if you purchase a watermark and license.
I suspect some companies will do all the work including suing the copyright thieves and take a percentage of what they get so you don't need to get involved except pay for their service.

https://www.digimarc.com/application/copyright

only problem is that once a site learns what the digimarc bots IP is they can block it from looking at their site. Then again constantly changing their IP which is quite simple can protect against that to a certain exetent. The casual thief is probably clueless how to protect against it anyway.

You can just invoice any site using your images. If they don't pay you can sell the debt to a debt recovery company and forget about it.

Question then is, are you willing to pay for the service. If not then tough.
 
also hot linking protection will stop other sites from "hot linking" to your images so that they use your bandwidth to show your images in their site. But you cant stop anyone from downloading you webpage and then stroing and display your image on their own site.
Google does that if you stop it from hotlinking to your site but it usually downsize the image to a very low quality file so its useless to anyone.
But most sites ignore any attempts to instruct them not to use your images.

And hotlink protection allows you to specify an alternate image to show if anyone does try and hotlink to your images. This can be fun as you put any text or picture you like in the image which will show in their site.
 
I am envious of you all. I wish I had my work plastered all over the internet. According to Photobucket, the work would make a nice Calendar, Wrap or Holiday Photo Card.

 
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ic-racer said:
I wish I had my work plastered all over the internet.
Click to expand...
its of very little use having it plastered all over the internet.
Time was when if it was in google you would get plenty of visits. But these days the source of visits to your website is dissipated around many more sites. So you need a presence in all the major sites such as facebook, tumblr, instagram, google, bing, yahoo and many many more which is a real pain becasue having just a single wbesite isn't enough (depending on what your sites about). Most of the sites stealing your images generate onl;y an occasional visit to your site and most of the major players don't steal your work.
 
I try to concentrate on the imagesto be worth stealing to someone. Nice if they care enough to steal them.Try to see it as a compliment
 
Show your work at relatively low resolution. Raise saturation, sharpening to optimize it for screen. That will make it substantially unusable for printing (low resolution, too much sharpening applied).

Low-resolution picture stealing is a fact which is intrinsic in this communication medium. The value is the high-resolution and in the possibility of printing.
 
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