I was recently reading a thread on Flickr.com, from flickr user _rebekka that had digital photos lifted from her account by some unscrupulous thief, and placed on iStockphoto.com for sale. The thief was actually selling her photos on-line, and making money from them. It gets worse! The photos included self portraits. So not only did he manage to upload the photos and sell them as if he were the owner of them, he also sold images OF the photographer without a proper model release.

This is pretty unsettling. I don’t make a living selling my images. But that doesn’t mean I want someone else to take them and start profiting from them, either.

So what do you do to keep your images safe?

The most secure thing you can do is to keep your images on your own hard drive, don’t connect your computer to the internet, keep it password protected and chained to your desk, keep your doors and windows locked, close the blinds….. well you get the idea.

But the point of photography, for many of us, is getting our photos out there where people can look at them. That is the only way to get feedback, learn, and let other people enjoy your work. So, what can you do to keep your images relatively safe in an unsafe environment?

Visible watermarks are one common method. You can use tools such as Corel’s Paintshop Pro X2. Another tool, called iWatermark is available from scriptsoftware.com. Many other tools are available, and are just a google search away.

Digimarc provides a service called MyPictureMarc that allows you to watermark your image and track on-line usage of your images. This includes covert, as well as visible watermarking of your images. This service starts at $79/year. The entry level pricing lets you embed an unlimited number of visible watermarks, and up to 1000 covert watermarks. However, you need to subscribe to the $499/year product to get the tracking feature, and to use up to 5000 covert watermarks.

Another option that will be available in the future is Attributor. I am currently waiting for the beta testing period to start on this system. It’s not yet available, but it sounds promising. This product will track your images on-line, much like Digimarc. However, you don’t need to embed a covert watermark in your images to track them. Their technology will examine your digital file, and calculate a digital “DNA” for it. It will then search the internet, and watch for the same file to appear on other web sites. I am really looking forward to trying this system out. When the beta period begins I’ll post more information here.