Reasons why you should always use watermarks on your photos

 

 

Watermarks on your photo are a touchy subject, and many people advise amateurs not to use watermarks. They want to see your photo without the annoying watermark, claiming it distracts them from the image. But what they are really saying, in my opinion, is that your watermark makes it more difficult to steal your image.

The internet has been a wonderful invention as it has torn down a lot of the old guard, the gatekeepers who would block newcomers from entering the industry, thus making it easier to get recognition and work. However, it has also led to a new problem that hardly ever happened in the old days: photo theft.

 

Social media has meant that many people want to share and post photos and videos all the time. Some of them are honest and create their own content, but there are a lot of dishonest or lazy people who want to steal your work and post it as their own. I routinely do an image search with some of my popular photos and find so many people posting them as their own work. Some of them do a good job of editing out my watermark, some just crop the image, while others just pretend that they are MeanBearMedia and own the brand. Watermarks are important. Anyone telling you not to watermark your images is more than likely someone who wants to steal your shots.

 

 

Social media also adds to this complexity with photo ownership, as many social media platforms allow the sharing of images but often don’t make it clear where the original image came from. Some social media platforms even try to claim ownership of images posted on them, which makes things even more complex. Watermarks are like your gatekeeper—they provide you some level of protection.

The photography industry has very little in the way of protection, unlike the movie or music industries. Try posting a 5-minute movie clip from a film and see how quickly you get into trouble. Try using some commercial music in a video you create, and your video will be claimed almost instantaneously by the music company. Those industries protect their products and know the value that their products have. They will ruthlessly take down anyone who steals from them, but the poor photographer has to deal with the theft of their work by themselves.

 

 

The last problem that photographers can have is something that started a few years ago and is becoming a very large problem now, and that is social media accounts that just repost other people’s images. Some of these accounts have grown very large as they are just searching for the cream of the crop images about a topic and reposting other people’s work all the time. They have no original work of their own and they just repost the hard work of others.

This can cause a lot of problems when they don’t provide credit to the original creator, and even when they do provide credit to the original creator, there is seldom any positive feedback to the original creator. I always request that those accounts delete my image and stop reposting my stuff. I don’t mind people sharing my work, such as bands or an individual who enjoys a photo, but I do take issue with accounts that aggregate content from other sources and post it for their own gain. And they do make money from aggregating people’s content. Usually, they will sell shout-outs on social media accounts or get sponsorship deals because they have a ton of followers. The only way they can remain successful is by using other people’s content. Can you imagine the music industry allowing someone to collect all their songs and give them away for free? Actually, that sounds very similar to the old Napster that was shut down for piracy.

 

 

So, how do we protect our work? Well, the obvious step is watermarking. But it is not foolproof, and someone who is good at Photoshop can remove a watermark fairly quickly. I actually approach protecting my images in a few different ways. The first thing I have had to learn is to accept the fact that once I have posted an image online, I have essentially lost control of it. Accepting that one simple statement has changed my mindset on how to implement the rest of the methods that I use. The first method that I use is the good old watermark. I actually have two watermarks that I use: one for work and one for my personal images.

 

 

Watermarks on your images serve two purposes. The first thing that a watermark does is make it more difficult for an average user to steal your image, as they will need some basic Photoshop skills to clone it out, especially if you place your watermark over some complex geometry in the image. But it is important to remember that it is actually very easy to use the healing brush in Photoshop, so most people can do this. The watermark is a deterrent, kind of like a guard dog in someone’s yard. It makes it more difficult for someone to actually use your image compared to someone else who has not used a watermark.

But I think that a lot of people forget a second very important role that watermarks play, and that is to do with branding. A watermark plays a very important role in brand building. Look at any product that you buy; it is going to have the company logo on it. Watermarks do exactly the same thing—never forget that. You need to stake your claim to your image and build your brand around your images and your watermark.

So, designing a watermark becomes very important. You want to make sure that the watermark is bold and easy to remember. I can’t draw a stick man to save my own life, so I hired an artist to draw my watermark for me. Don’t skimp out here by trying to draw one yourself. Spend a little bit of money and get a watermark that people can remember. I have lost count of the number of times a band has come up to me at a festival and said, “Are you the guy with the bear logo?” No one in China has a watermark that is even remotely similar to mine, and it really helps bands remember me.

 

 

My business watermark is very bold and ugly with colors that match my website, with the intent to make sure that my brand is clearly visible and easy for anyone to recognize at a glance. Most of my money comes from working with bands and selling their images, so I obviously want to protect that source of income. Most musicians are cool and don’t steal, but most band managers or their media managers are scumbags and will steal anything they can get their hands on. Never trust a band manager.

My watermark does the trick most of the time, and very few musicians will actually use one of my images without permission. An image search with Google or Baidu does help from time to time. Unfortunately, I did have some issues with theft from a music label here in China and had to modify my approach after losing a court case. Trying to take a Chinese company to court in China is not easy. So it is best to be proactive and make it more difficult for someone to steal your images in the first place.

Since I lost the court case related to photo theft, I have added a black border around my image. The black border overlays part of the image, so it is slightly cropped now with the border going over part of the image and my watermark going over both the image and the black border. So anyone trying to steal my image will have to crop the whole image and edit out the watermark.

 

 

This extra step does seem trivial, but it has had a big effect on the number of stolen images that I find. The more difficult you make it for someone to steal an image, the less likely they will choose your image and they will hopefully go after some easier images to steal. That is one of the big reasons why I have disabled saving photos on my website. I don’t really care if someone wants to use an image on my website as a wallpaper or on a non-profit blog, but there are just too many people wanting to steal my images for money.

 

 

I do get a lot of requests from people for a photo they saw on my website, usually a crowd shot at a show, and I always make sure to email them a copy of the photo they want. You will never make money off a crowd photo, so it is far better to send the crowd shot to the person and make a friend. My work watermark is perfect in that it is bold, ugly, and hard to miss, and it works great for my digital work. However, I shoot a lot of film and landscape photos in my free time, and that watermark would not work on my personal work.

 

 

Outside of work, I shoot a lot of film and landscape shots. It is the yin to my yang. My work is crazy and loud, so when I am not working, I want things to be nice and peaceful. Landscape and film shooting fill this gap perfectly for me, but I don’t want my very loud work watermark on my personal work. The whole point of my work watermark was to be loud and in your face. But that doesn’t work very well with black and white film shots or landscape work.

Now, I don’t make money with my film work, and my landscape work has made very little money over the years. It is something that I do for fun, so protecting it is not as important as my professional work. The biggest problem that I have is with Instagram and people reposting the images, so I slowly started to add a new watermark to my film photos to make it easier to see if someone is reposting one of my images. I didn’t want to use a very bold watermark this time, so after some thinking, I decided to go with a design of a Chinese stamp that is used by many classical Chinese artists. The Chinese stamp is an approximate translation of my company name. Sometimes translation is not easy, and this was the closest translation that I could think of.

 

 

I usually put the Chinese stamp in one of the corners of the image that has a lot of negative space, so it is not too distracting. To be honest, I would prefer to post my film photos with no watermark, as I think any color distracts from the black-and-white image, but in the modern world, digital theft is just too easy, so I have to provide some kind of protection now.

 

 

As I have stated earlier in this blog, once you post a photo onto the internet, it is gone. You have lost control over it. Watermarks and black borders are not a form of protection; they are a deterrent against some of the bad actors online. But once you have posted an image, if someone wants to take it and use it, you have no real way to stop them. So I basically look at it like this: I do my best to protect my work images and provide some kind of branding for social media so if they do get shared, then at least there are some forms of digital fingerprints that could lead back to me.

But you can’t protect every image, especially the snapshots. If I see something interesting and want to share it quickly on social media, I am not going to go through all the hassle to add watermarks and a black border. If someone wants to copy a snapshot, then there is not a lot I can do about it. A snapshot will hardly ever generate any kind of income, and once something is on the internet, your control is gone. If we look at the meat shot above, I posted this image onto my Chinese social media called WeChat Moments, and very quickly, it was copied and used by other people. I consider those shots to almost be public domain at that point, and I can’t protect or monetize them. In a culture like China, where so many things are copied and shared all the time, I am simply grateful when someone posts my name as the photographer.

 

 

The last bit of advice I will give you before wrapping up this blog post is to do with image resolution. Never ever upload hi-res images. I resize all my images to be under 2MB in size. That way, even if someone does steal the image, it can only be used online. At 2MB, you are not going to be selling that to any stock sites online, and most print publications want images that are at least 8MB in size or larger.

Never upload full-res images to any site, especially sites like 500px or Flickr. Downloading and stealing images from those sites is extremely easy. Keeping low-res images online is another way to protect yourself. 2MB in size is more than good enough for even 4K screens, so there is no need to go larger than that.

 

 

So, to wrap up this blog post, here is my advice to photographers: If you care about an image, watermark it. Never post full-res versions of your images onto any website. Always remember that once an image is online, you have basically lost control of it. If someone likes it and wants to steal it, they will. If an image is important to you, only post low-resolution versions of it online and do a picture search for it with Google from time to time to check if someone is using it illegally. Until technology finds a way to use some kind of digital fingerprint to protect digital images, watermarks are the only way we have of staking a claim to something we created. Don’t listen to the YouTubers who scream “No watermarks,” protect your work.

 

Shaun.