Tammy Green

Unfurling

I started watermarking my photos this Spring as a suggestion to handle the rampant, uncredited use of my photography by people who troll Flickr. I don’t know yet if it’s helped control that problem, but it has created a few new ones:

1. Flickr is no longer a clean back-up of my work. I don’t keep copies in the cloud, so I will have to remember to grab my hard drives in the event of a fire or natural disaster.
2. It takes twice as long to upload photos and a lot more space. I don’t like batch watermarking because they can be badly placed or not light enough. Maybe I can find a method that works equally well in each situation, but I would still need to check every instance before I uploaded it.
3. I have to field non-customer requests for clean copies for my work and explain Creative Commons licensing. Yes, it’s already happened, and no, I don’t get paid for dealing with this overhead.
4. If I want to print a photo through Flickr, I need to upload a separate, private copy of the photo.
5. Watermarks offend me. I really don’t like how they muck up my photos and impact my enjoyment of my Flickr stream.

I know there’s no perfect way to put your work out on the Internet and protect the integrity of the work at the same time. I only hope this controls the larger problem of photo theft. Have you found a better way of handling these issues? Please leave me a comment, thanks!

Written by tammy

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