Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive » Image Protection

Image Protection – Is It Worth It?

It’s fair to say that these days, having some kind of web presence is an essential part of any creative professionals marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a photographer, writer, or whatever, you’ve got to put yourself out there and be seen if you want to get ahead. If that seems self-evident, so too is the logic that if you make your money from your work, you also need to protect it so that a) you continue to earn from it, and b) somebody else doesn’t without you getting your cut.

To some extent I think there are two sides to ‘theft’ of work in the same way that there are two sides to most things (sometimes more). Now it’s always going to be something of a grey area when you say there are two sides to a story and people will always try to create a blur between the two, but broadly speaking for me at least, it breaks down to ‘fair use’ and old-fashioned ‘ripping off’. Fair use is something I see as perhaps creating a nice image that someone wants to use as their forum avatar or their desktop wallpaper for a month or two until they get bored. Ripping off on the other hand, for me that’s anything where someone tries to take (or not give) credit for another persons work in some way, or alternatively turn a profit from it.

Fair use i’m not going to worry about. I think if you put something up on the internet then you have to expect that to a certain degree it will be taken and as long as there’s no malicious intent, well, it happens. It’s the digital equivalent of sticking a C90 cassette in the recorder and taping 2 hours of John Peel because there was nothing on in the day time worth listening to. We’ve probably all done it at some point and as illegal as it may be, your ears thank you for it the next day.

When it comes to ripping off, that’s a different thing entirely, the internet can be a big bad place, and you need to protect yourself from it. Traditionally there have been many ways to go about this, from the incredibly useless right-click protection that stops a person right-clicking the page and choosing the ‘save-as’ option, to the equally useless website feature where layers are used in the design to overlay a copyright sticker. Where both of these techniques fail is that it’s ridiculously easy for someone to just hit ctrl+u followed by ctrl+f and then search for .jpg or whatever extension the image is likely to be in. It takes a couple of seconds and the image is lifted so if you’re using either of those methods, do yourself a favour and change it to something a little more robust.

Other methods exist too of course and each works or fails to varying degrees: ‘Save to web’ for eample offers fake reassurance by saving at 72dpi instead of the printing favourite of 300dpi but that matters not, the web couldn’t care less whether an image is at 1dpi or 300 000. It looks exactly the same. So what can we do and is it worth it?

Well, up until now one of the best way of protecting your images has been to put your own watermark on the image in such a way that it would make cloning it out a real pain. Again it wasn’t a perfect solution but it would at least reduce the chances of your image being taken to a large degree, if done right. That option though, I suspect is no longer going to be viable. Readers of the Sunday Round-Up will remember I posted a link to Tim Parkin’s blog and a post he made that introduces the forthcoming Photoshop feature “content aware fill”. Previously the watermarking method worked on the basis that many image thieves would rather not spend the time needed to remove it and without removing it the image looked plain ugly. With content aware fill in the off’ing I strongly suspect that’s no longer going to be the case and it’ll be open season for all your hard work.

So, what are the alternatives? To some extent you could theoretically still use watermarking, you’d just need to make the watermark big enough to cover most of the image and you could use layers and overlay/linear burning effects to make the watermark less destructive to the appearance of the image as i’ve done in the corner of the image above. As I say, I think you’d need to do the whole image or a large percentage in that way for it to have any deterrent effect, but it’s a free option. A more effective way, or a way that can be used in conjunction with that is Digital Watermarking. Essentially, with digital watermarking, information is stored in the image itself which makes it much harder to remove or bypass. There are still ways around it, nothing is 100% secure, but as with the traditional method of watermarking, actually doing that and spending the time doing it should be enough to put most potential image thieves off. Firms such as Digimarc offer solutions which include tracking services and although it can be expensive to do your entire collection, $79 for 1000 images is not too bad if you’re a professional wanting to secure his/her work in this way.

Ultimately the question you need to ask yourself is “What do my images mean to me?” and then find the balance you’re comfortable with. If you don’t want to pay for protection then the options are becoming more limited each day. You can lock your images away on a secure server and only allow passworded access to potential clients, but then what’s the point of having a web presence if you can’t display your work? The same goes for only putting your ‘average’ work on show. If all a client sees is average work, then your professional image or ‘brand’ will appear equally average.

I hate to say it, I like a bargain as much as the next guy, but a paid for solution is fast looking like it’s going to be the only way forward.