If you are new to blogging and you are struggling with your photos and videos, this list of great tools will help you step up your game. But once you have some amazing photos and videos, it’s important to stop people from stealing them.
Unfortunately, there are people out there that will take photos from your blog and pass them off as their own, to improve their own sites. When you put a lot of hard work into your visual content, it’s vital that you stop this from happening. If your readers see images on other sites, there’s no way of telling who created them, so they may even think that you are the one stealing them. The good news is, there are some simple ways you can stop image theft from your blog.
Use Watermarks
Watermarks are one of the easiest ways to protect your photos. When you add a watermark to your photo, you create a unique logo in the bottom corner, usually with your name or the name of the blog. So, if somebody steals it and then puts it on their site, anybody that views it knows that it’s not their original photo. Follow the link to learn more about using watermarks on your photos and some of the potential benefits. It’s worth noting that there are ways to remove watermarks, so if somebody is willing to go to the trouble of taking them off, they could still pass off your photos as their own. However, this is a lot of effort and watermarks still act as a great deterrent. They encourage anybody that wants to use the photo to ask for your permission first. You can then allow them to use it but specify that they have to link back to your blog and give you credit, which drives more traffic to your site.
Disable Right-Click
The easiest way to download a photo is to right-click on it and hit download. Most people know this method but your average person doesn’t know other methods, like going into the HTML code. So, if you can stop them from right-clicking on the images in the first place, you will prevent a lot of image theft from your blog. If you host your blog on WordPress, you can use this great plugin to stop anybody from clicking on your images. Although there are ways to disable these kinds of plugins, it’s not something that most people know how to do. If somebody knows enough about computers to disable plugins, they can probably download the photo without right-clicking anyway.
Add A Clear Copyright Notice To Your Site
Some people steal photos because they want to improve their own site without putting the work in. But some people take photos because they like them and they simply don’t realize that they’re not supposed to. Copyright rules can be complicated and a lot of people don’t know how they work, so they don’t think that they’re doing anything wrong. These kinds of people would probably be horrified if they realized that they aren’t supposed to take the photos and they would remove them right away. You can stop this accidental theft by posting a clear copyright notice to your website. Make it absolutely clear that you have ownership over all of the images and nobody can use them without permission. Give an email address for any inquiries about using your images because it can benefit you if people share them with a link back to your blog.
Do Reverse Image Searches
No matter what protections you put in place, your images could still get stolen. In most cases, people will take them down as soon as they realize that they’ve been caught out. If they didn’t realize that the images are copyright protected, they’ll be happy to remove them for you. But before you can get people to take them down, you need to find out where they are being used in the first place. Every now and again, you should do a reverse image search on Google for each of your images. This will show you all the websites where that image is being used. Hopefully, it’s just yours but if they are on any other sites, you can take action and get them removed.
Many bloggers don’t realize that somebody could be stealing their images. But if you use these simple tips and tricks, you can protect your pictures and videos.
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