Protecting Your Photography: Watermarks and Intellectual Property

Quick Take

Learn why it’s important to protect your digital photos and what methods are available. This guide will help you get started.

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Whether you are an amateur, or an expert photographer, you need to know about protecting your photography. Watermarks and intellectual property or copyright statements are methods frequently used by professions, but family pictures can be copyrighted, too. This is done so that cyber-criminals or even casual lookers will not use your photographs for their own purposes. Check out the following guides on how to make certain your photographs are protected, or private, so that you don’t have regrets or issues in the future.

Why You Need to Add Copyright Information to Photos

Photographs taken with your digital camera, or even any images you will take using you’re smartphone, should be protected. Before you proceed to add watermarks or copyrights to your photographs, it is best to understand the purpose and benefits of adding this information. In the following guides, we cover general information about your rights, how watermarks can be used to signify a copyright on your work, and even a offer a program that you can use to help.

How to Add Protection

The linked articles below will help you to protect your photography copyrights in several ways. By adding copyright information, you’ll be able to verify authenticity, or the identity the owners, of a photograph. You will also learn about geotagging your photographs, so that you can easily identify where a picture was taken - that is, if you don’t mind others possibly knowing. Note that the last article is about adding a time and date stamps to a photo. Adding the time and date isn’t truly a way to protect your photograph. However, since a time and date stamp are unremovable, you will have the protection of knowing that no one will try to claim they recently captured a previously taken photo that is actually yours.

Software to Use for Adding Watermarks

Photographers usually take advantage of photography software or graphics editor software. This is because they can use a graphics editor to edit pictures on a computer, and save them in other image formats. Most graphics editor software has the option to add watermarks, as well. You can learn more about adding watermarks using the following photo editors:

Watermarking Photos in a Batch

Are you planning to use a single watermark for many pictures? There’s no need to watermark each photograph, because that is time-consuming! You can watermark landscape, portrait and cropped photos all at once, and anywhere over a photo. If you are using a custom visual watermark, you may also use it as a batch watermark to protect photographs located across several folders on your computer. Learn how to use batch processing to place watermarks on several pictures using these guides:

Online Service and Downloadable Software

If you are unsure about using a program on your own, but still wish to protect your work, there are several online photo services which offer watermarking services for free, or with subscription. Check out the articles below on how to use online photography services to add copyright information to your photos. You should also check the downloadable software reviews for information related to editing and watermarking a photographic images on your computer. From there, you can narrow down which editing programs you would like to try or buy.

References

Image credit: Magnifying glass with copyright symbol by Plenumchamber via Wikimedia Commons.