"Watermarking your creative content"
I know just how you feel. You have spent hours editing an image for use on Facebook, Instagram or any of the myriad social sites on the planet. You have invested your heart and soul coming up with a catchy line for your picture. Finally, it's online and you're excited because you know it's fabulous and will get tons of likes, shares and comments.
Then the unthinkable happens...you see your work in someone's else business page....SAY WHAAAAT! %#&#.
Imagine that you have taken a photograph, then spent hours choosing the font, the color, the graphics. You are thrilled with your work and now someone has stolen it. They could have simply shared it, and given your site the credit, but this individual chose to copy and paste instead. Simply put: This is theft.
Once you get over the anger at seeing that your words and image have just been stolen. You need to know how to protect your work in the future.
You have two simple options:
- Put your website on your image
- Copyright your work
This will not protect your work from getting stolen, but it will show that the images are yours.
Putting your website on your image is quite simple. If you have done any graphics work on sites like Fotor, Canva or Pixlr, you can simply add another field of text with your website. These sites, also, give you the option of tweaking the transparency so that your site can be quite prominent or more subdued.
Here is the same image with one of my sites:
Some businesses chose to include their sites right in the middle of the image. They include their sites in a prominent spot so they cannot be cropped out.
The second option is to copyright all of your work. You can start this process from the very beginning...when you are tagging your images. When you are tagging your photos, be sure to go into the Properties setting and include your name under the copyright. In addition, place your copyright on the image prior to any online distribution.
This is how it's done:
Hold down the ALT key and type in 0169. This is what you get:
©
Practice that a few times, until you become comfortable with the process.
The next step is to add your name to the © symbol.
Like this: ©AnaBanana413
If you use Photoshop, you can do this to each and every photo that you take prior to releasing them. This way you don't have to think about it later. Personally, I don't like doing this because I crop and change the size of my pictures. Sometimes I have done this and the copyright watermark is just too prominent for my aesthetics.
Photoshop will, also, give you the ability to multiply your watermark all over the photos. Stock Photography sites like Fotolia and Shutterstock use this feature to protect the work of their photographers. The watermark is removed once you have paid for the images.
PLEASE NOTE:
You can copyright your own artwork and photography.
If you are using photos that you have not taken yourself, you don't have the legal right to claim them as your own, therefore, don't put a copyright watermark on them. If you have paid for the right to use a photo, you have only purchased the right to use it - you have not paid for the right to claim it as your own. That photo is someone else's artistic property. A copyright watermark tells the world that a specific work of art is your artistic property, because it was created by you.
This is not intended as legal advice. It is intended to show the reader how to identify their work as theirs prior to publicizing it on the Internet.
