i am a freelance photographer, how can i protect my photos from being published or copied by other people?

Question

i would like to use my photos in my future website.

Answer 1

the answer is you really can not protect your images any more than they already are protected. when you create an image there is automatically a copyright on the image even if the copyright symbol is not on the image. by registering your work with the copyright office, you are allowing yourself the added protection in court for more monies. even without registering your work (which i recommend very wholeheartedly) you work if entitled to full copyright protection under the law.

only 2 real ways to make sure that your work is not published or copied by others.
1) never display your work so anyone has a chance of taking it no matter what the medium. kind of a self defeating purpose; what would be the point of even being a photographer if not to share your work. i dont recommend this approach.
2) the approach i do recommend is spreading the word about copyright enfringement and educating as many as possible. works much better and people get to share and see your great works.

Answer 2

First of all, your photos are automatically copyrighted by law at time of creation. The copyright is good for the life of the creator plus an additional 70 years.

Second, if you want to put them online safely, the best suggestion I'd give is to watermark them. A watermark is a semi-transparent image or word over the image itself that deters people from copying the photo. I open my images in photoshop, create a new layer and type in my studio name. I then drop the layer opacity to about 50% and center the text. This way, people can still see the image, but to copy it and edit the text out is quite difficult.

Answer 3

Well first you can use a program like Adobe Photoshop to create your own special water mark for your photos. It also lets you embed information about you into a photo. But know that there is always a chance for someone to steel and publish your work. The way that you prove it is your is to keep the original production of any work you are going to display. If it is digital work, make all your markings and encryption then make a copy to a disk and mail it to yourself or seal it is an envelope having someone (not in your family) witness this. It shows when you did the work.

Answer 4

Besides what everyone else said, the easiet way is to put a little plug on the bottom of your photos (xyz.com) and also...probably the most important...make the photos 640x480. They'll be small enough that no one will be able to print them (anything decent anyway) and you won't look tacky by putting 100 levels protection into your photos. You could also disable right-clicking on your site, though this is easily disabled by anyone with decent computer skills.

One more thing...you could present your pics in flash format, if you can find a program that can do that for you easily.

Answer 5

If you want to have a copyright for your images from the government you have to fill out a form, pay $30 and nonreturnable copies of the images you want protected. They will send you a certificate a few months later- but the copyright date is affective when they receive you package. This is the way for you to legally copyright the images so you are protected by the government.
You don't have to do this to have a copyright on your images- but it will help you if someone steals your work.

Answer 6

Copyright etc. but it is impossible to truely protect them, but it can be made very difficult if you embed them in a flash file/gallery and load them externally from the flash and give them very random file names, and provent people from being able to get the directory listing of the containg folder, it takes an expert with a lot of time to get round that. If you would like i can create such a gallery for you for free, examples of work can be provided on request. just message me here if you want, i am a professional website designer but have lots of free time (and enough money) so i am currently doing free sites for small bands, small artist etc, basically anyone who could not afford them otherwise.

or i can just advise you further if you like.

Answer 7

Most programs, have a place where you can put a water mark on the pictures, to identify them, as yours..

Answer 8

write your name or initials on it and make that layer of writing opacity almost see through OR add it in a corner full opacity

Answer 9

copyright