You may or may not have noticed that I have taken down most of my photos. I am in the process of watermarking them, which is no easy task given the flakey temperament of my computer these days. However, after reading this post, I decided it was something that really needed to be done sooner rather than later.
So far I have done one. If you can spare a moment, take a look at it please and let me know how it looks in your browser.
UPDATE: Thank you all very much for your help! Looks like it’s working.
Karly says:
Looks good to me! I’ve considered doing the same thing with my photos, but man thats going to be a lot of work!
October 4th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Audrey says:
Looks good in Firefox to me. Great picture, by the way!
October 4th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Tina says:
It looks fine in Firefox.
October 4th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
becca says:
Yeesh. I read that article and changed the licenses on all my pics in flickr. Of course, I have a gazillion pictures of our nieces on my blog. How to fix that???
October 4th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
momhuebert says:
Looks great in both Firefox and Safari.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Kvetch says:
I use IE and AOL browsers. Looks fine in both.
Sadly, ’tis why there will never be photos of my kids online.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
jen elslager says:
Looks great to me, and I’m in Firefox too.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Beck says:
That is so creepy. ANd now I will take all of my pictures off my website.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Ortizzle says:
Looks fab in my browser! Looks fab, period. (The editor in me says maybe shorten your copyright text so it doesn’t cover so much of the pic… like maybe just the copyright sign + your website.)
October 4th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
chickadee says:
i’ve been thinking about adding a watermark too. yours looks good by the way.
what about the copywrite on your blog? can you just add that or is there some procedure you have to go through?
October 4th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Laurie says:
Looks great to me! Laurie
October 4th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Goslyn says:
Looks good. I’ve started doing the same thing with my photos. Sucks to have to watermark across the best part of the picture, but it just can’t be avoided.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
MotherPie says:
The photo looks great. I have watermarked the VERY FEW personal photos I’ve put up for the reason I don’t want my children’s private lives violated. It is so easy to steal photos and I don’t want my children “misused” or “appropriated.” So I keep a very fine line and bend over to extremes to keep private lives private and public lives very very edited. I don’t post any photos to Flickr, either, that I wouldn’t mind someone using (no personal photos there, either). I’d prefer permission requests and links back, but that doesn’t happen in this world most of the time – copyrights are hard to prove – and our private lives, lived publicly online are in a new unchartered territory.
Maybe because I started blogging and posting photos when my children were teens that the boundaries of their own presentation versus my presentation of them… needed careful respect on my part…
October 4th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
maria says:
It really is so pretty….great photo and quote. I have firefox as my browser and it looks good.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
chilihead says:
Looks good. It’s gonna be a bummer to do all those pictures, but you’re right. It needs to be done. You can do mine next and I’ll love you forever.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Lexi says:
This is such a sad thing…I do keep my son’s pictures on a separate blog, which obviously I’m going to have to make private…after reading several stories like this, I made my flickr accounts completely private…just as photo storage backup for myself. This kind of stuff sucks.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Grafted Branch@Restoring the Years says:
Wah wah wah! Your pic looks fantastic. And it looks like a lot of work! *sniffle*
I don’t wanna do it. But I know I should.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Lilly says:
It is a beautiful photograph and very stealthworthy by someone in need of that sort of photo for whatever article or pamphlet they’re working on. I agree with Ortizzle above that you could shorten the watermark to just the last line and I think you can lighten it a bit, that is make it more transparent. As long as it’s across a detailed and main part of the photo (so that it can’t easily be painted or cropped out) and is just opaque enough to be readable, it’s good.
Personally, I think that it’s less likely that there are people out there using these photos for something unseemly as people taking them and using them as illustrations without paying for them.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:19 am
amanda says:
Looks great to me…
October 5th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Krista says:
So how do you put a watermark across the most likely to be used portion of a picture without completely ruining the picture? I mean I’m playing with one of a friend that her face could totally be the only thing they want and I don’t really want a watermark right across there… so sad!
October 5th, 2007 at 1:43 am
Jennifer says:
It looks fine. I wish the text wasn’t so long because it kind of detracts from the picture, but I guess that’s kind of the point.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Deege says:
Your watermark looks perfect in IE7.
Something else you might consider is to disable right clicking to prevent people from copying your pictures. It’s explained rather well at http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=41
People who would steal pics of children have to be just sick!
Love your blog!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Aunt Murry says:
Read the article, here is a link that has some shareware for watermarking which might make it wasier for you and other folks.
http://www.tucows.com/search.html?search_scope=win&search_adv=0&search_size=&search_size_multi=b&search_terms=Watermark+photos
October 5th, 2007 at 10:07 am
sam says:
Your watermark looks great.
Could you explain how to find out whether our pictures have been stolen? I use Flickr and cannot seem to figure out whether photos have been used without my permission.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Stephanie says:
Oh…my… That would have never crossed my mind for someone to do that. But then, I’m not as warped as the person doing it. Thanks for sharing that. Watermark looks great!
Steph
October 5th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Sandi says:
Looks lovely and very professional.
October 5th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Angie at Sonflower says:
Thanks for the headsup. Good info.
October 6th, 2007 at 8:31 am
lisa h. says:
So is the point of watermarking that people won’t misuse your photo by editing it to be something different or offensive? Or is it just so people can’t copy it off your site and put it on theirs saying hey, I love this photo?
October 8th, 2007 at 6:42 am
mopsy says:
Chiming in late to say there’s a WordPress plug-in that automatically watermarks all photos. It’s what I have used since we discovered someone stole a photo of our baby to pass off as her own baby on a MySpace page.
To lisa h…watermarking does nothing to prevent someone from copying or saving your photo to their computer. It makes it harder to steal or claim that you took the picture, and it gives an address or name of the source. Watermarks are very difficult to remove without damaging the integrity of the photo.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:10 pm