Watermarking Your Images

It’s the most obvious way – slap a URL on your images and call it a day. Unfortunately, it makes your images look stupid and somewhat “ruined,” but it’s a necessity because someone else will just right click/copy your image and slap their own logo on it. Kind of reminds me of the whole YTMND.com vs. eBaum’s World battle.

When watermarking an image, you can also overlay your logo and set a certain level of opacity so that it remains see-through, yet, doesn’t distract much from whatever your logo is covering up.

As for URLs, you’ll want to either set a shadow or an outer glow to them. Don’t bother putting a white or black box behind your URL watermark, since it’s too easy for someone to swap out in Photoshop.

You’ll want to make it difficult for someone to stamp out in Photoshop, which usually works best when you watermark over a complex backdrop that has gradients or textures. That way, you can call out the bastard who ripped you off, point out his lousy Photoshop work, then show the original image (without smudges on it) on your blog!

Injecting Copyright Data into Your Images

This is one of the ten million reasons to love Photoshop: Open an image, then check this out: there’s an option called “File Info” in the “File” menu. It has a bunch of fields that you can fill out for Description, Author, Author Title, Keywords, Copyright Status, Copyright Notice, Copyright Info URL, and tons of other things. It will then inject this information into the machine code of your image, undeniably making an original image “yours.”

If someone else rips off your image, you can still see that data within it. Another way for them to get caught red handed.

Screw with Hotlinkers – It’s Fun!

Hotlinkers are geniuses who right click your image, copy the path, and display the image on their site, using your bandwidth. It’s perhaps the laziest way that anyone can steal an image. The best part about it is that you can simply replace that image on your server with something obscene, like porn, or good old Goatse. I Goatse’d a hotlinker before, and boy, was it hilarious to see that image on his professional business site for a good 3 entire days. If you’re boring, then you can simply disable hotlinking entirely from your HTACCESS file.

So, before you upload that image, think twice. Think in the mind of a thief. How can they steal your image? How can they manipulate it so that it looks like their own? How can you brand your image so that the bottom part with your logo/URL can’t simply be cropped out or stamped out in Photoshop? These are careful considerations to ensure that you are getting the proper credit that YOU deserve.