Photo theft

[Softix]

I think you should placed some liks in your photo or probably insert your name in it so it won't be placed anywhere of if they are published it would give some backlinks into your site as well.

[walwyn]

Whilst I've started adding information into the EXIF data, I'm not as yet going to go to the hassle of attacking my photos with the ugly stick or watermarking as it is commonly called.

One thing I've found is that the referral logs tend to give a good indication of where people are looking at the images from. Some odd locations too:
http://unjobs.org/duty_stations/fran...ur-cher/photos

[Andy]

Originally Posted by walwyn

Though I replied to this yesterday. Never mind. Recently found some of my photos on a site pulling images via an RSS feed to tart up their commercial pages. They're now blocked.

It's good fun when someone leeches your images from your own site. It's often happened to my photos on ebay adverts... i just upload a rude message in place of the original, with same filename' 'If this guys steals photos and bandwidth, would you really want to buy anything from him?' That sort of thing doesn't look too good in your ad

[walwyn]

Yeah you could do that with a flickr account until last year when they changed things so that if you replace an image it gets given a new URL. Something to do with server caching they say, but the change came at the same time that there was a user revolt over Yahoo using flickr content.

Most leeching of images from flickr is done via their API where sites pull off images based on keywords/tags, either by the searches or RSS feeds. Here is a typical example of 'tarting up your website':
http://www.viaouest.com/galerie1566.html

the size of the displayed images probably just puts it into the realms of 'fair-use'.

Actually this automatic pull from flickr is quite a dangerous thing for the website to be doing irrespective of any copyright issues, because they have no control over what gets tagged, they have no control over what they start displaying.

For the page in question one could tag anything with 'Laval' and it would appear on their page. Imagine some one posting a photo of their kid in the bath tagged with the name of some village. Additionally flickr allows people to post HC porn so long as it is filtered as such, but many people don't filter it properly so it is also likely to be appearing on these sites too. Not good.