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Which Sites Protect Your Photos Best?  Why You Should Care

As you create and upload images to the Internet, your camera, your editing software, your tagging of information as you upload can all be associated with your photo and help people find you as the rightful owner if someone steals your image.  Unfortunately, some sites strip off the critical information which identifies the photo as yours.  

Once your image then becomes separated from you, it may get classified as an "orphan work".  The UK has passed a law which protects companies using these "orphaned works", so your photos may start appearing in many unapproved and even offensive commercial uses.

People have proposed that preserving rights information is the key to avoiding having your work "orphaned" (taken from you and used without your knowledge or permission), but that argument is weak at best.  The information associated with your photo is obviously easy to remove.  If your photo primarily appears somewhere like Facebook which is not indexed by Google Image Search, the thief of your photo will say that they performed a diligent search and claim protection under that UK law.  The new law shifts protection from the creator of the image to the unauthorized user.  Even if you were inclined to pursue a court case in the UK over the incident, your compensation will be limited to someone's definition of what the "market value" was, not the amount you would have required up front before the image was used.  

Hopefully the UK law will get overturned, not copied in other countries.  In the meantime, here's an excellent article on ways to maximize the information associate with your photos, provided that the site you upload to doesn't simply strip that information off:

Six Ways to Keep your Digital Images from Becoming “Orphan Works”
http://photometadata.blogspot.com/2013/05/six-ways-to-keep-your-digital-images-from-becoming-orphan-works.html

Fortunately the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group tested how Social Media and photo sharing sites manage metadata embedded into images which are uploaded to their sites, so you can consider where your risk is the greatest.  These are the results as of March 2013:
http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/social-media-test-results.php

The short story: at the time of that test, +Google+ was among the best sites preserving the data associated with your photos, Facebook and Flickr were among the worst.

Here's an article on what to do when you find that your image has been taken:
Has someone stolen your photo?
http://picturedefense.blogspot.com/

Photo: This photo of +Lori Hibbett was taken last night at sunset, up the hill behind our house.

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99 thoughts on “Which Sites Protect Your Photos Best?  Why You Should Care”

  10. Scott Thomas
    Reply

    Which is why I always watermark my photos if sharing on flickr/Facebook/Twitter. I know it's annoying but too bad.  I also do not allow downloading or Save As…  I do see a lot of screen scraps but people can not do too much with those.

  22. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Thank you +Ian Stratton.  It was even better to experience.  We could hear thunder but could never quite see or capture a lightning bolt.  I'm simply thankful that we can be in a place like this in minutes, rather than be surrounded by concrete mountains and asphalt rivers.

  23. Jared Youtsey
    Reply

    Thanks, for sharing this.  It's been tumbling around in the back of my mind the past few days.  We may see a huge uptick in the number of people watermarking their images.  That's at least much harder to remove than EXIF and other metadata.

  87. Traci Sinclair Dyer
    Reply

    I hate to keep repeating myself, but every photo you take is like a piece of art, exquisite art. I'm a professional writer and those us who are all understand our distinct writing voices. I see you distinct and unique artistic eye that is your stamp on every photograph you take. It's beautiful because it's so subtle, but always there.
    Thank you again for sharing your gift.
    Traci

  88. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Thanks so much for you comment +Traci Sinclair Dyer.  French wineries don't have wine makers they call themselves wine growers, and they view their role as enabling the terroir, all the unique influences of place, the geology, the soil, micro-climate, and the genetics of the plant itself to come through.  Wine is grown, not made.
    Similarly, places and moments we experience have a unique character. I approach my role as being a curator, preserving that character as I share the place and the moment with you.  Of course I can only do that within the capabilities of the equipment and software, my experience and skills, and my memory.  Our perception and memories are far from strictly photographic, so in a sense my experience of the place, my perception and recollection of the moment, and my approach towards capturing it and conveying it all become an integral part of the end result.  I am overwhelmed by the grandeur of many of the moments I experience.  If I can convey some fraction of that on screen, on paper or on canvas, I'm happy if I can bring you along for the ride.

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