Copyright

Can anyone recommend a program for putting a small watermark or copyright notice at the bottom of my photos? I'd like to be able to batch hundreds of them rather than do them individually if this is possible since I have over 800 photos on my site. I'm in the process of having the backend of my website redesigned by Jack Brauer and so now would probably be a good time to do this.

This afternoon I did a websearch for a town in the UK and one of the first images to pop up was my own, but not on my site. Several individuals had taken the image for their own use and also a a major UK train company was using it on their website. They are being contacted about this copyright violation. I'm sure many other images are also being used and so I'm going to finally do my part and put some sort of a copyright notice on each image so that I can more easily prove that the image is mine. Any suggestions on how to go about doing this on so many images?

You should be able to make an action in Photoshop that will do this. First open a photo. Then go to the Actions palette in Photoshop and click "New Action." Then go through all the steps you would to add a copyright notice on the image. Then click the stop button to stop recording and you'll have your action. You can then go to File > Automate > Batch. Select the option you just created and select a folder with all the files you want to add the copyright to.

You can also add your copyright in your metadata in Bridge (though this will be stripped if you use "Save for web...") I've also found that disabling the right click and having a copyright notice pop up discourages most people from stealing photos (even though it can be easily bypassed). And I've found that nearly half the traffic to my site comes through the Google image search. Google opens your web page in a frame and, at the top, provides a link directly to the image. This allows people to find and save photos very easily without ever really visiting your site. So anytime my web page is opened inside a frame, I have code that removes the frame. You can see all my codes for disabling right-clicking and not opening inside a frame by going to the View Source on one of my pages (just don't steal my photos while you're at it!).

Thanks Grant. I guess I need to spend the big bucks and buy Photoshop CS one of these days. I'm still using P.S. Elements for everything. In the meantime, are there other suggestions on how to do this?

Grant I tried the right click on your front page and it gave me the message but still let me copy your images without any problem at all. This is kind of fun! I could redo my website with all new images.

Hi Erik,

I'm not as familiar with Elements, but could you create the text for the first image - then copy to the clipboard and just paste it one-by-one into the others? Kind of time-consuming, but it could work.

Ken

That's okay, Erik. Half the images on my site were stolen from your site, anyway.

My only other suggestion is to scratch your copyright notiice on the sensors in your camera. That way every image will come out with the notice, no work required . Maybe someone else will have an even better suggestion.

I changed the code on my opening page and my gallery pages, so that you can right-click on the text links, but not on the photos. The whole page has to load, though, before it kicks in. So maybe you were saving before they had loaded. The larger images on my individual photo pages have my old code, which should be effective as soon as you open the page. So hopefully those are a bit better protected against unscrupulous people like that Stensland fellow.

From what you're saying, it sounds like Elements doesn't include Actions. If that's the case, it sounds like you could create an action in standard Photoshop, then load it into Elements. I found this page that tells you how to do this. Sounds like a pain, but I suppose it beats buying Photoshop.

Well its about time this long time lurker contribute something to this forum. Here is a program that will watermark in batch mode from what I can tell. And its Free.

http://www.pictureshark.com/index.htm

Another option: Ask your webmaster to do it for you. I think you can create a single watermark image and then using DHTML overlay it on top of your pictures on your web site.

Edit to add:

Also have him prevent right clicking. That certainly isn't fool-proof but it's something else to make it a bit harder on potential thieves. Basically, if they want to steal your image bad enough, they will find a way.

Thanks for the great suggestions. Harold, I'm glad you stepped out of the shadows. Your suggestion is a great one. Jeniffer, I'll give some thought to the DHTML overlay as well. Thanks everyone!

This is a pretty cool Web album generator that can add watermarks to all of your images: http://jalbum.net/ You can program it add a copyright sign to every photo in your gallery without having to open each photo one by one. The best part is that the program is free!

Here is another freebie I found. http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/uMark-Lite/umarklite.html

I tried PictureShark and it will do what you want, but I didn't like the GUI. You will also have to create your own watermark first.

If you dont mind paying a few dollars for one, here is the link for some shareware and free trials.http://www.snapfiles.com/downloadfind.php?action=s&st=Watermark

Harold

doh! wish pictureshark was on OSX

Erik,

One more thought - something you already may have considered. Once you contact that railway in the UK, you might give them the option to pay a fair fee to continue using it.

Ken

The biggest deterance by far is to keep the images very small and low res on your site. On my new site you may not see it but evrey image is watermarked by the background of my site. I also have a program that takes the images as I load them to a photogallery and manipulates them to a point that no-one would want them for anything useful. The fairly strong copyright notice also listed on my site is a nice little deterant, but as The Master Lock company says, A lock just keeps an Honest Man Honest, not much you can do to get those determined to steal your stuff but catch them later and make them bleed from every oraface. Anyway I'm all excited now and on my way out the door to make some photographs.

Good luck with the new site and do invest a little on Photoshop CS or better yet CS2!

Hey Erik -

I haven't tried those software programs mentioned above, but hopefully one of those will work. I would highly recommend actually putting the copyright in the image, instead of relying on web code to overlay a copyright or try to block image download (futile). That way the copyright is always with the image, and someone has to consciously crop it out to steal your image.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned in the above comments is that there are situations when you'd want people to be able to save images... for instance print customers or stock buyers who are contemplating which photos to buy, where to put them in their home, etc. Sometimes they print them out to show others and make notes about their order. Sounds unlikely, but I've seen it happen.

Two suggestions..

You could download the 30 Day trial of Photoshop, or I'm sure if you had a CD, DVD, or External Harddrive, and asked nicely, one of us would surely be willing to help.

:2cents: <-- Woops wrong forum.

You can also try ImageMagick, which is a commandline tool for manipulating images. It's available for Windows and UNIX (including Mac OS X), and as a commandline tool is easy enough to use for batch jobs.

The command you're looking for is:
composite -dissolve {percentage} {watermark} {photo} -matte {output} OR
composite -watermark {percentage} {watermark} {photo} -matte {output}

Create your watermark in PSE, then batch away... (that's
FOR %PHOTO IN (*.JPG) DO composite -dissolve 30 watermark.jpg %PHOTO -matte processed\%PHOTO in Windows,
for i in `ls *.jpg`; do composite -dissolve 30 watermark.jpg $i -matte processed/$i; done in UNIX - assuming you have a subdirectory called 'processed' in the directory you're processing...

If you really want to get complicated / complex you could have your backend add the copywrites automatically by using any one of the many image libraries integrated with PHP or ASP...