Video: How to stop your photography getting stolen

One of the big problems of the world wide web (and there's many!) is the ease with which images can be stolen. 

In this video from Adorama, the ever-knowledgeable David Bergman shares some excellent tips for the best way to protect your photographs from being stolen online.

As Bergman mentions, there's a few steps you can take to protect your work. The first is to only upload low resolution shots to your website, which will make it much more difficult for someone to make high resolution prints of your work. 

However, recently developed tools like Adobe's Super Resolution or Topaz's Gigapixel AI allow for low resolution images to be upscaled to printable size relatively easily, meaning anyone with access to these tools could, in theory at least, still rip off your work. 

One solution is to watermark your images, and although this isn't a completely failsafe strategy it does at least make the ownership of the image clear. There's two types of these - visible and invisible, each with their own positives and negatives, as he explains.

Bergman also touches on Google Reverse Image search, disabling right click and save on your website, and embedding metadata in the image, while also touching on some of the legal implications of pursuing copyright claims - at least from a US perspective. 

As a side note, Bergman's suggestion that Instagram add a photo credit field is a great one - after all, there's already the option to tag someone, add a location, a link, and countless other things - come on Instagram!

All-in-all, this is a great video with some really useful advice for better protecting your work online.

Cover image: Getty