It is impossible to protect photos online

I post my photos on Facebook with a frame/border and a logo and name. This is in one layer that I can easily place over the photo in Photoshop. This gives my photos their own character. Not so much to "protect" them, but not everyone will simply take the trouble to remove that.
The photos are of sufficient quality for Facebook, but heavily compressed. When posting them, Facebook also compresses the photos automatically. As a result, any enlargement is of poor quality.
Nevertheless, I realize that my photos can be (mis)used by others. I accept that and it doesn't keep me awake at night.

Fritsflow wrote on Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 12:58  | reply

People who pluck your photos from the internet aren't your customers anyway. You'll never earn anything from this kind of people

Oh Nando, this article gives a view full of good possibilities..Now Facebook and the likes are threatening us with using the photos for commercial purposes .We indeed have to make a choice . Visibility on a larger scale (as indicated by the likes..) and take the advertisements as a bonus .Because who checks, if you choose the paid version ,that FB is going to play fair and will use the photos anyway. And...what then?

You can of course start a legal battle if the thief lives in your own country. After all, you own the copyright. But if the thief lives in Farawaystan, you can have all the law on your side, it will still be even more difficult to track down the thief. Let alone sue them. Moreover, the costs will rise higher than the benefits.
I found a photo of mine years ago being presented as a photo of the thief. He had stolen my photo, removed the watermark and offered it for sale on his page at Hyves. I then contacted Hyves and they immediately removed the photo and also removed the thief's account.
Not all providers are willing to cooperate. It often costs you a lot of time to combat such thefts.
Simply not putting your best photos on the internet is the best solution.
What I have also done before is remove or change the color of individual pixels or a small group of pixels here and there in the photo and then put the photo on the internet in low resolution. If you want to print an enlargement, you will only see the altered pixels then and you can therefore do nothing with such a print.
But..... there is a downside nowadays. And that downside is called AI. It can repair the altered pixels if you give it the right instruction.
So adjusting those individual pixels is fun, but someone who is willing to put in the effort can restore it by using a lot of time. The question then is: Does the thief want to put that much time into it? I don't think so.

I use copytrack and report the use of my photos by third parties, it is up to me to approve this or outsource it to copytrack. It is a no cure no pay company and suppose you collect 600 for a photo, then they have, I think, off the top of my head, something like 20%. You don't have to do anything yourself and 2 webshops that had borrowed my photos then both paid 600 euros. both companies from England in hunting supplies that had borrowed fox photos from me.

Well Elja, you only get a message from copytrack if the creator of a photo says that it should happen and copytrack doesn't do that on its own. A lot of our photos take part in competitions and then they would all get that message, so I can skip those photos and only the photos of which I say they are really stolen, well, they go after those. They only go after photos on websites. Not, for example, Facebook photos.

Commercial sites all know that it's not allowed. Wedding venues know that too, they really do, but oh well, it's nice and easy to just borrow a little photo. They hide behind the fact that they didn't know. I assume that you verify the photos you use first, right? Sending a message along the lines of would you please remove my photo on an actual Commercial site is rather pointless.
Someone who tries to make money from my photo themselves, I am not going to send them a friendly message first. I hope you can distinguish one from the other, elja. I do this with Commercial parties and not with someone who writes a blog or something.

By commercial companies I mean e.g. a store, webshop that used my photos to sell their products. Copytrack wrote years ago already that they only go after that kind of thing. Not after blogs that e.g. write an article about e.g. the fearless competitions...but anyway , it's a tricky thing and I only use it when I have verified and know for sure that someone else is trying to improve professionally using my photos.

If you post a photo that you are happy and proud of, then you know it is your photo. You could say of a photo taken by someone else: I took that, while knowing that it is not so. Does that give satisfaction? I am convinced that it does not give satisfaction, because you know that the photo is not your own. Does someone want to use my beautiful photo? No problem.

Henri wrote on Wednesday 8 April 2026 at 12:20  | reply

Back when I still had my own website with my travel photos, mainly taken in countries outside Europe, I used the "slice" function in Photoshop. You can then divide the photo into a (large) number of pieces, so that when right-clicking and selecting "save as", only a small piece of the photo is saved. Of course, someone who knows Photoshop reasonably well can 'stick' those pieces back together, but that is quite a lot of time-consuming work.
It is therefore no guarantee, but it is so cumbersome that a number of people probably can't be bothered with it already.....

Fritsflow wrote on Wednesday 8 April 2026 at 21:27  | reply

"Now someone takes your photo for their own website and the model discovers it. She invokes portrait rights and wants compensation. Who is liable then?"

The person who "stole" it is liable here. Elja had it contractually sorted out properly in this example, after all. The thief didn't.

Incidentally, all this doesn't have much to do with norms and values. It's about business-related, lawful interests. Someone who steals a watch in a shop isn't first politely asked to return the watch, are they? That would be something.

How to bypass it can be found on the internet. Search for "bypass copying a protected website".