Marking your Photos

Protect yourself against copyright theft
I'm sure we'd all be happy to see our work displayed on several websites around the world, 'course we would. But what if the work on show was being credited to somebody else? Here's a hypothetical situation. You are a super nail technician and you produce fantastic quality photos of your work which everybody loves. However somebody loves it just a little too much, they lift it from your website, copy it to another website or salon window and claim that they've done the work themselves. Hopefully it hasn't happened to you but to anyone who has suffered a similar fate, I'm sure it's enough to make your blood boil. Grrrrrr! So then, is there anything we can we do to try and prevent it happening in the first place? Happily there is a simple solution to deter the opportunistic thief. (please see footnote)

Mark your photos as your own

Most graphics software will have the ability to mark your photos for you, programmes such as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop are both excellent but they may be daunting to use for a non-technical person. The fact that you have to purchase them doesn't help if all you want to use them for is marking your photos. The best solution in my opinion is to use Irfanview, it's really easy to use and it costs absolutely nothing, reason enough to download it right now, huh? If you havent downloaded it already, do it now and I'll show you how easy it is to protect your pics.

Copyright your pics

Ok, you've downloaded the Irfanview programme and you're ready to roll. Open the program and open any picture, again we can use one of mine so it doesnt matter if you mess up. Let's use our old friend, the fruit picture. Click on the thumbnail to open the full size picture and then save it to your own computer. It might help if you save it to your desktop so that it's easy to find. Ok then, let's mark this picture together, we'll do it in stages so you can follow along easily.

Step 1
Start Irfanview, click on 'File' and then 'Open'.



Step 2
Browse to where your pic is, hopefully you have it saved to your desktop. Click on the Fruit pic and then click 'Open'

Step 3
Click and drag your cursor to outline a rectangle as shown in the pic below. We want to draw the rectangle as near as possible to the subject, let's say in this case that the strawberries are our subject. I'll explain this in more detail later.

Step 4
Click on 'Edit' and then 'Insert text into selection..'



Step 5
You are now faced with a dialog box and like everything else with this program, its simple to use. One thing to note however, depending on which font face you use, the size may change significantly especially if using the script fonts (handwriting). They are quite small so you may have to paste your text into your pic and check to make sure that it looks right, if it doesn't, just click on 'Edit' and then 'Undo'. Simply repeat the procedure again using a slightly different font size. Once you've got your pics and text the way you want them, the program will remember your settings and you wont have to do this again unless you want to change it yourself.

Step 6
I expect you'll want to see the finished product, eh? Happy to oblige.... looks really elegant, dont you think?



Things to Keep in mind
It is very important to place the text as near as possible to the subject being photographed, and if you can avoid it, dont put the text on a solid coloured background. Here are some examples of how NOT to do it. Click on the thumbnails on the left to see the full size pic with the copyright protection, and then click on the thumbnails on the right to see how easy it was to get round it.

Copyright intact Picture 1	Picture 1 has the copyright notice positioned near the top of the page. I simply opened the picture in Irfanview and cropped off the top of the image, you can hardly even notice the difference in size, can you? It took me about 2 seconds to remove the text!!	Copyright gone! Picture 1a.
Copyright intact Picture 2	Picture 2 has the text placed on a solid coloured background. I opened the picture in Paint Shop Pro and simply brushed white over the text. I could have done it a lot better with just a little more time. As it was, it took me all of 10 seconds!	Copyright gone! Picture 2a.
Copyright intact Picture 3	Picture 3 has the text placed way too low down on the image, it's absolutely no trouble to just lop off the bottom of the picture, takes a couple of seconds. Take note that in all 3 examples, we can 'steal' the pics and still properly display our subject, the strawberries.	Copyright gone! Picture 3a

Note
Please take note that this is not a totally failsafe solution. It is, as I stated at the outset, designed to disuade the casual thief from stealing your pictures. There are other methods that you can use, all of them a lot more difficult to apply than the method used on this page. Remember though, that none of them are guaranteed to stop a determined thief. There's only one way to absolutely guarantee that nobody takes your pictures and that's not to display them on the internet.
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