Just a random thought for the morning.
Watermarks used to be the way to go, to stop people from just taking your images and using them however they want. They’re also used to send sample images and then ask for payment.
With AI advancing, it’s very likely going to get easier for the layperson to click a button and have AI remove your watermark.
How do you plan to safeguard against this?
how to protect your picture simply dont share them… use a private gallery on a website
I don’t. My images have no commercial value, I don’t do it for a living (though at least I do work in the photographic field), and I don’t really care to.
Watermarks didn’t stop anything. People used Photoshop to remove them or cropped them out of the picture. Some people didn’t care about the watermark at all and used the picture with it visible.
99% of my revenue comes from paid gigs, I think it’s wasted energy trying to protect my images from being stolen, it’s 1% of my revenue and even then, I’m basically doing mental gymnastics to prevent the slim chance that MAYBE someone or an AI steals an image and uses it, and that same person was going to be a paying cx otherwise
I’d rather just spend my extra brain power and time playing a game or working out
The venn diagram of people who watermark their photos and people who make photos anyone would actually want to steal are two non-overlapping circles.
I like this
Oof.
Everyone is saying not to bother watermarking. And nobody who does is any good does it. As a counter example here is a highly successful photographer whose work is fantastic that uses obnoxiously large watermarks: https://cherylwalsh.art/
You can see by her subject matter, her work might be one that is frequently stolen by people who don’t want to pay for prints. Much more so than the average photog selling prints.
The watermark is big enough that it would not be easy to remove by an average person even as tools to do so improve.
Y’all acting like you are making a living from selling landscapes… in reality that a handful of people
It doesn’t affect me (hobbyist) but if I’d be concerned I’d use something like this
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/I have a related question: How common is it for images to get swiped? I am a hobbyist and generally feel like if someone stole an image I took, I could just take another one another day. If an image is really meaningful to me, I don’t usually post it online.
I never put watermark because it looks too ugly and ruin the picture.
But if I somehow really need to protect it and it has to be watermark, I’d put big translucent watermark that stretch through the whole image so the AI will not understand which part is watermark. But again, it ought to ruin the picture.
Simple. I don’t post pictures online except for 30 as examples on the same places.
Post less online.
We’ll have to see if embedding content credentials takes off in cameras so the details can be kept and not erased.
I’ve been looking at Openstego which looks like a reasonably secure watermark that is not immediately obvious.
Just get paid for your work beforehand. Focus on doing commissioned work, don’t try and sell photos afterwards (which is a dying market anyway). Watermarks are pointless these days. And I barely see anyone using them anymore.