Qan­tas Air­bus A380 does a low pass over Sydney

…ruins it.

At least if you have cre­ated a water­mark of suf­fi­cient bold­ness to defeat the var­i­ous semi-skilled image thief’s which inhabit the world wide web as it exists today.  You only have to do a sim­ple Google search to give an exhaus­tive list of tools and tech­niques to remove water­marks on images.

As RC Con­cep­tion says in this guest blog post on Scott Kelby’s website:

The view­ers eyes are now set to do the dance of “let me see what this pic­ture COULD HAVE been pro­vided this big sym­bol wasn’t in front of it”.

My sim­ple copy­right water­mark, as in the image above would defeat nobody,  but I have now real­ized that there are bet­ter ways to assert your own­er­ship of an image / deter Copy­right Thieves:

• File name — A tip / direc­tive from Peter Kroghs “The DAM Book: Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment for Pho­tog­ra­phers” was to include your name or moniker in your file name so that if you ship them to a client, or upload them some­place, there is still a sim­ple and vis­i­ble ref­er­ence to you right there in the name.
• Meta­data — I am already a meta­data freak, and every one of my images con­tains my copy­right state­ment and con­tact details, so any­one using Adobe Light­room, Google Picasa, or even Win­dows 7 meta­data will see all this information.
• Flickr Stats, Google Image Search, Tin­eye, and web server logs - Occa­sion­ally search­ing for ref­er­ences to your images using these tools can help you track down images thief’s.
• Fight Back Against Con­tent Scrap­ing — Got a great tip from this arti­cle on Word­Press Secu­rity (Update: Orig­i­nal Source); a sim­ple .htac­cess rule can pre­vent any web­site other than yours from link­ing to your posted images:

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?mysite.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

• Pro­fes­sional Image Track­ing — A num­ber of ser­vices have sprung up that attempt to dig­i­tally track your images such as Digi­marc and ImageRights. They achieve this in dif­fer­ent ways, Digi­marc by embed­ding track­ing infor­ma­tion in each image file, and ImageRights by main­tain­ing a data­base of your images and con­tin­u­ously search­ing the web for pos­si­ble copies. Bet­ter still, ImageRights is after launch­ing a free ser­vice pro­tect­ing up to 10,000 images, check it out here!

Up to now, I have used my basic Copy­right state­ment as a water­mark on pretty much every image I uploaded to either Flickr or this web­site. this often resulted in some pretty ugly unin­tended effects such as on my home screen:

With all that said, and despite the low level of copy­right theft that I expe­ri­ence, my new strat­egy for pro­tect­ing my images will be as follows:

• Flickr, Face­book, DPRe­view, or any other pub­lic web­site will get a Water­mark as follows:

© 2010 All Rights Reserved www.JonathanBourke.com

• On my own web­site, I will slowly replace all images with water­mark free ones in order to present them in the best light pos­si­ble. I will also reg­is­ter these images with ImageRights.

No Water­mark is the New Watermark!

Now if only Adobe Light­room 3 could out­put an “Export Pack­age” con­tain­ing all the required for­mats