Blog reader “Dan” writes to ask whether he should be concerned about “photo piracy” and other forms of unauthorized use of photographs he  shares online.

I am a great admirer of your photos and I especially like reading your blog and the detailed captions you include with your photos. I also follow on occasion some of the forums on DPReview and one I found very interesting concerned the unauthorized use of photos that are posted on websites. I would like to start posting some of my images on Flickr and Facebook but have had second thoughts after reading the forum thread on photo piracy (not that anyone would find my images worth stealing of course!). Since you post photographs on a number of places on the web, I was wondering what you thought about that and whether it is even worth worrying about. Thanks very much.

Thanks for writing, Dan, and thanks for your kind words about my photography and this blog.

While I’m not an expert on all of the legal ramifications of image theft and photo sharing, I can share a few thoughts with you and other readers. I do think that it is a good idea to be thoughtful about what you share, where you share your photos, and the form in which you share them. The Internet is a very big place and a lot goes on “out there” that you and I may not know about or understand and which we cannot control. Once a photograph is out in the wild, wild west of the Internet, it can take on a life of its own.  There are risks, and some of them are impossible to completely control.

However, there is also a lot of potential value in having your work seen. This could come from the simple pleasure of sharing your photographs with family and friends. It might progress to sharing your work in forums where you might get valuable (and not so valuable!) comments and criticism. It can also be a form of marketing and building your brand, especially if the photographs are part of a more substantial web and social media presence.

Most people try to find some acceptable compromise between the risks and the benefits of maintaining and online presence. Some risk is probably acceptable (and if not, you should probably never post anything) but some reasonable precautions may minimize the risks and contribute to the gains.

Here are some of my ideas about finding the right balance point between good and bad exposure. I acknowledge that other photographers may have different ideas and may even object to some of mine — but I resigned myself to there being no solution that works for everyone.

• Limit the dimensions of the photographs that you share online. The value of your shared work to those who might use it without your permission decreases with file size. There are many stories of folks sharing gigantic, high-quality, screen-filling images… only to find them for (unauthorized) sale as desktop images or even as images in print and electronic advertising or business graphics. No size is small enough to completely eliminate the possibility of use as, say, a smart phone screen or a spot image on a web site, but keeping it small reduces the number of potential uses.
• Add branding to your images. There are a number of ways to make it clear that the photographs are your work. Some of us place a margin around the photograph or along one side and add identifying text. Other photographers will place the branding image/text right inside the boundaries of the photograph. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Text placed in the border could more easily be removed by a person with basic image editing skills, while the text on the image itself is much harder to delete. On the other hand, the text within the image border may be a greater distraction from the image itself.
• Add basic copyright text. At a minimum add the © symbol with the year and your name: © 2014 G Dan Mitchell. Yes, it is possible to remove this text, depending upon its placement — I put might within the image itself — but the act of removal itself would tend to suggest an intentional violation which, especially if you register copyright, strengthens your case against the unauthorized user.
• Add a watermark within the image. Place a nearly invisible bit of text within the image itself. Yes, it could be removed, but how much effort will a typical unauthorized user take?
• Include full information in the electronic file. Your copy of Photoshop or Lightroom or other applications will let you embed important information into the text portion of the image file including your name, copyright notice, URL, phone number, title, description, tags, and more. Use this feature in all of your shared files.
• Use no higher quality than necessary for web viewing. In addition to keeping the image dimensions small, keep the quality level of your jpg files fairly low. There is virtually no benefit to your viewers when you share highest quality jpg files — in fact, the large file size may slow down page loads — and a lower quality level may make your file less appealing.

Consider that some of these measures actually make life easier for folks who are legitimately interested in your photographs. For example, I frequently am contacted by clients who see a photograph online while searching to a type of image. The inclusion of a border with my name and URL makes it much easier for these interested clients to find me, and that is good for both of us. The border serves another purpose — it separates the images from the visual clutter of other images on search pages.

Yes, dedicated image editors can remove almost any watermark or other identifying markings. But the fact that they would have to go to the trouble of doing that in order to get a semi-clean copy of a small, moderate quality jpg file is likely to make your photographs much less attractive to them.

Bottom line: I feel that the benefits of sharing outweigh the potential risks, though I think it is worth taking some simple precautions as outlined above.

Articles in the “reader questions” series:

• Concerned About Image Theft
• How to Add Borders to Online Photographs
• One Lens for Landscape and Wildflowers on Hikes
  
• Yosemite in October?
• DSLR Sensor Cleaning
• About Sharpness and Detail
• Camera Stability and Long Lenses
• Photographing in the Rain
• Landscape Lenses
• About Depth of Field

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.