Posted by Guest - How To Stop People From Stealing My Website Photos : I upload alot of photos to instagram, and in the past I know people have stolen them and used them on their profiles and I've seen them on websites too. What is the best way to stop people from using or stealing my website pictures as their own?  I can put text on it, is that the best way?

Guest Says: what kind of photos are they?  Is it just instagram where you are using the photos or are you selling them on websites?

Guest Says: They are scenic pictures of all kinds of things.  Yeah just Instagram for now but I may post on other places also like Twitter and Facebook, basically social media places.

Guest Says: My recommendation is that normally I wouldn't care but if you are using a scenic photo that is your photo and you dont want others using it, then I would put your name across the center or slightly faded etc. The picture would still look great, it would just have your instagram name across the center and slightly faded. I would also never upload the full scenic photo, meaning if you have a photo that is 1800 x 1200, the photo you upload will be 600 x 400 etc, so you shrink it first, and only you have the full sized photo. That way they never have the full image anyways and smaller images cannot be stretched larger to print or view without losing clarity etc. It would still look great on the small Instagram or Facebook window and that is still plenty big for viewing on websites.  So your image will still look great, but no one will be able to get your original, and even the one they get has the text written across it.

Guest Says: Is there any way they can remove the text?

Guest Says: Well they cant remove the text, but they can try to overlay or patch the picture but it will take work and they will lose some quality doing that.  The key thing here is that they never get your original full sized photo because you never upload that one anywhere, and no one wants to do a bunch of work to try to remove text. People stealing those images to use just want to copy it, they dont want to put a bunch of work into it. When they see your text across it most will just look elsewhere and not waste their time with it.  Good luck.

Guest Says: Any app recommendation for adding text?

Guest Says: There are alot of apps that add text on photos, this is a good one for fading text or even adding banners with it if you want: http://www.softdd.com/mobile/banner-text/index.html

Guest Says: All photos are copyright automatically, so you cant use anyone else stuff whether its photos or anything else, if someone is stealing or your photos and using them, then the best thing you can do is make it a major hassle for them to do that.  Add some faded text with your name or website across it, the faded wont take away from the image and no one wants to copy someone else photo that has that watermark text on it. Like someone else said also dont upload the full sized image so only you have it, only put a scaled down image on the internet.  That means anyone that tries to make expand it larger size then quality will be bad since you cant stretch photos that way and only you have the large image for that type of stuff.

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