Please Help This Mom (me) With Protecting Daughter's Photography

Hey Everyone,

I am guilty. I admit it.

I know protecting images has been talked to death all over the internet. I should have paid attention because I knew this day would come...and so it has.

I am a biased mom, but my daughter is really, truly gifted in the arts...has been since she was little..she will be 19 this year.

Anyway, she can't even choose between theater, photography and art because instructors in each have told her to follow each one! But I love, love, love her photography...and tonight she emailed me, telling me she is putting it on tumblr.

My daughter loves me, but teens just don't listen to their dinosaur moms...even if I make sense, there is automatic tuning out. So I kept my mouth shut and ran to this forum for help.

PLEASE don't make me spend weeks researching all of the stuff I should have read about years ago regarding copyright protection of images. Oh pleeeeeezzze.

My young adult daughter is gonna experiment in the online world, posting her pics somewhere to share with family/friends. Where should she be doing this/what should she be doing to protect her work for the future? Right now it is "social" - a "look what I"ve done" kinda thing...but I don't want her to have regrets in the future, if that makes sense. I want to give her the info she needs asap....and photos have never been my thing, so I need your help.

Thanks!

Calm down! Tell her a fellow photographer, me, told you to tell her to only put low res images up online plus to watermark them with her name / web site. As I learned recently "don't fear piracy, fear obscurity" ;-) SY

PS Tumblr is good to get the word out, but she should also have her own website / blog. wordpress.com would be free and pretty much ideal in her case ...

Also have her write down all the details of the image i.e. the camera settings (aperture, resolution etc... like they do on pixabay.com), if it's a drawing scanned, you can skip that part and other artwork she's done will serve as a finger print of her style etc that an expert can figure out later... Mail a copy of the original picture and even a digital copy (on a memory card) to herself. that copyrights it and so long as the seal isn't broken (opened) it will hold up in court- they may open it to verify the data... Have her write down all the details she can about it so there is a written documentation of proof that she took it etc...

Next make dam sure her image has a copyright watermark and that's visible. Like Sam said, in low resolution- you don't want someone to take that and blow it up selling coffee mugs or full sized portraits outsourced on canvas and selling them...

Making sure a copy is online is actually a good way to protect it because of the very thing that Simon/Hans do with images to verify they are truly not copy written images (Google image search that compares your image to images indexed on Google anywhere else)... having a copy with a watermark will tell sites like pixabay that this image is copy written and posting it on tumblr with a copyright notice also protects it to some degree (you can't always stop thieves but most protections are to slow them down, and isolate the thieves to only those with very high skill sets in online theft...).

Also one of Hubpages protection (bad one too) moves to not allow any image that seems pixelated (to stop use of watermarked images but this also blocks legitimate images so it's a bad "fix" for the issue really- but for your daughters use it's going to save her). By pixelated it means you cannot put a blurry or even watermarked (even hidden watermarks) picture on the site or use it...

That should protect her pretty iron clad (this is what i do with anything from images to content I want to outsource for i.e. eBook formatting work to protect myself from potentially dishonest (cause you don't always know even if they're nice) people... She can also register the picture with the copyright offices (more ironclad) which will actually check to assure it is in fact hers and not someone else's  If she doesn't post it online and doesn't copyright the work (in any way I mention) someone else could potentially take it and copyright it themselves! With all the data from the camera, the memory card, and the picture, you have a post mark date, and all you need to fight it. If someone else does pull a fast one and tries to copyright it, you have proof that it's yours not theirs, but with none of this protection you may potentially lose the rights to your own work- the system is a bit flawed but the copyright gives you more protection!

Hope this helps!

Jerrico

Yup, low rez and watermarked.  Also, if you can afford it, a bulk registration with the copyright office (they are copyrighted as they are created but the registration lets you sue for punitive damages should anything happen).

Also, services like PicScout can be a lot of help.

nice one Liz!

Thanks Everyone!

Truly appreciate all of this great info...

I'm calm now, Sam :)

This will help me too. Thanks! Off to change some images now.

Oh, and creating watermarks is easier than you think.  I just did a new tutorial on it for About.com Graphics Software if you need the info.  The tutorial uses Photoshop Elements but the basic steps work in most any editor although the names of the menu items may be a bit different.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/ss/Watermark.htm

Thanks for the tips, Liz...