As well as making the Image Of The Week exclusive to site visitors and subscribers as mentioned in the last post, I am cracking down a little in other areas. More changes are required.
Most know that I routinely post higher resolution images of my photos than others. I want them to look their best. I also add watermarks, because I am optimistic that anyone sharing the images will leave the watermark alone so others will know I took the shots and they can come looking for me. That doesn’t seem to work.
Worse, the watermarks I place discretely on my photo site also don’t work. The honor system I have relied on for so many years has failed me.
More fool me, I suppose. I have lost count of the number of friends that walk up to me with a big smile, to tell me they have folders full of my images to use as screensavers. I have seen scrapbooks with dozens of my images. I know many that screenshot an image and simply crop out the area where my watermarks should be, completely butchering them in the process. I’ve seen many exclusive images in many unexpected places. I’m not paid for any of this usage, of course, even when it has commercial value to the thief. Worse, I’m not even being credited. That’s not cool. Really not cool.
So what?
So, as part of the above mentioned crack down, I’m making watermarks more obvious. Making them harder to screenshot around or crop out. I’m going to begin uploading lower resolution images.
The originals won’t have watermarks. The originals will be high resolution, gallery quality, as always. Prints remain available at any size required. But I see no reason to fill someone’s entire Instagram feed for a month with over a hundred images they grabbed and spent an afternoon taking off my watermarks. Yes, that also happened.
A lot of time and effort and frankly love goes into making these images. It’s incredibly depressing to realize again and again that those that like my work sometimes feel the need to steal it. Most of the photographs I share can be shared on socials. I actively encourage that. Most images have icons on them for this purpose! All I ask is that I am credited, so others can discover and enjoy what I do. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. Sadly, others do. And they are spoiling it for those of you that don’t do this kind of thing.
Hence the changes, effective immediately on my photo site and, going forward, on my social media posts. I want to state for the record, this is not a rant. I’m not angry. Just increasingly fed up. Against all evidence to the contrary for several years now, I have remained an optimist. Clearly, that’s been a mistake at least in this regard. No more. I only began the use of watermarks to try to combat this incessant leeching of my work. It has not been effective. Perhaps I should just post watermarks without images. Yes, that might work. 🙂
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