Put A Watermark On Your Photos!

PlagiarismToday.com

PlagiarismToday.com

Nice information today about putting watermarks on photos in order to protect them online.  Clearly, sometimes it does not stop someone from stealing your pictures, but it certainly does help.   Read the post here.

GHTime Code(s): 2c942 
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Data Validation

I know this is deadly boring, but did you know that your computer isn’t telling you if your pictures are being copied correctly and thoroughly?  If you transfer files, including digital images, from one hard drive to another, or from a memory card to a hard drive, or from a hard drive to a DVD, there’s a chance that the transfer didn’t go quite as smoothly as your computer says it did.  Sometimes the transfer errors are big, sometimes small, and sometimes they can seem to get worse over time.  Errors may be a sign of trouble with your computer’s memory, drives, driver software, or almost any other part of the whole system.  While I haven’t detected any trouble with my own system (yet), I’ve been reading about this lately and I’m starting to run through the process of validating my backup drives and DVDs.  I’ll report back with more info when I get further along.

By way of explaining why this has come to my attention, here’s the story:  I use an online service called PhotoShelter for delivering digital images to my clients.  I pay for a certain amount of storage, and every now and then I have to remove some images to make room for new ones.  In the past, before deleting pictures stored on PhotoShelter, I’ve downloaded them all to my computer and burned them to a new set of DVDs (they were burned to DVD when they were first UPloaded to PhotoShelter, possibly months before), to make sure that I had a copy of everything.  This resulted in multiple copies, not being able to keep track of them, and spending a lot of time backing up pictures I was pretty certain I’d already backed up thoroughly.  For a long time now I’ve had a better system in place and a lot more storage at PhotoShelter, but it still fills up.  I want to delete a bunch of images from PhotoShelter, but first I want to validate that everything I have on hard drives is sound.

Here are a few links:

dpBestFlow.org – Peter Krogh, working with ASMP, has an in-depth discussion about data validation, including videos.

ImageIngester and ImageVerifier – ImageVerifier is free.  The user manual (6.3 mb – look near the end) helps but not enough.

TheDAMforum – is tied to Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book, and is a great place to discuss Digital Asset Management issues.

DigLloydTools software suite – contains DiskTester, which will exercise a drive and help reveal flaws, and IntegrityChecker, which verifies backups

SynchronizeProX – produces validated transfers, as does

SuperDuper – free for the limited version.

DigitalFAQ – discussion of DVD media quality

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PicScout

PicScout

I just learned about PicScout, a service for managing and tracking images online, and I’ve signed up to try it out and see what happens.

As I see it, there are two main uses for the service.  First, it makes it easier and faster to get permission to use a picture you find online.  People who are looking around on the web to find images they want to use for publishing, advertising, etc, can install the PicScout ImageExchange add-on for the Firefox browser (currently the add-on is only available to beta testers).  With the add-on installed, when you browse around you will see a little symbol in the corner of some images, indicating the images have been identified by the add-on as ones that are registered with PicScout.  Here’s how it looks:

Screenshot from this page...

With the Firefox add-on, little blue symbols appear for PicScout registered images.

You click on the symbol and get a popup, with some information about the picture, and a there’s a link so you can go and interact with the provider of the image.  Mostly, you would just go and purchase a license or otherwise get permission to use the image in your publication.  Here’s the popup:

Clicking on the blue symbol, you get this popup.

Clicking on the blue symbol, you get this popup.

The second main feature is called ImageTracker.  PicScout explains it well:

With its proprietary image fingerprinting technology, ImageTracker proactively searches the Internet for images that match selected entries in the PicScout ImageIRC™. ImageTracker identifies matches, even if the images have been cropped, colorized or altered significantly, including watermark removal. The technology is non-intrusive, highly scalable and acts by identifying unique patterns within the images to allow comparison operations. The PicScout technique does not rely on embedded code, so it survives many forms of alterations and can match highly manipulated images to their original sources. After finding your images, ImageTracker creates a screen capture that documents each image use, then sends you regularly scheduled reports. You’ll know exactly who has used your work, where they’ve used it, and if they’ve been authorized to use it.

I’m interested to see this kind of image management growing, and I figure I should do my tiny little part in trying to make it happen.  With so much of the media environment existing primarily or exclusively online, and with significant movements pushing against image ownership and control on the web, there have to be new and better ways of managing the spread of content online.  Content providers like photographers must be able to control the uses of their work, and it should be fast and easy for everyone else to access the work and get permission to spread the work around further.

It’s not yet clear what this is going to cost.  Presumably there will be a fee to register and “fingerprint” an image with them, and then they will take some percentage of any proceeds that result from the licensing of the image.  I look forward to seeing the numbers, and seeing if the system works easily enough.

I heard about PicScout through PhotoShelter, the service I use to distribute images to my clients.  PhotoShelter have recently partnered with PicScout, and are not (yet) charging anything additional for the PicScout features.  As PhotoShelter has served me well for a few years now, I’ve come to trust them.  Neither PhotoShelter nor PicScout (nor anyone else) have compensated me in any way for trying their services or reviewing them.

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Goodbye Pilfered Magazine …

Pilfered Magazine home page on 2/8/10.

Here's how the site's home page looks on 2/8/10.

and good riddance.  Last week I wrote about Pilfered Magazine, as did a lot of others who were outraged at the site/magazine for publishing images stolen from the web.  Today all the images they have published on their site are gone, replaced by a new home page, seen above.  Here’s an excerpt:

With respect to our community, we would like to announce that we are officially re-imagining our perspective.  Our hopes are to give you a better, more inclusive and suitable place where you can continue to be inspired and participate in creating content.

In pursuit of this endeavor, we would like to continue receiving your suggestions and encourage you to help us build this platform by submitting only copyrighted and permission based content.

More conversation about Pilfered can be found at the Copyright Alliance (here), PhotoInduced (here), the Copyright Zone (here), amid others.  It appears they intend to keep the site going, though with images that are used by permission.  I predict they will therefore be licensing the images they use, and they will then resort to selling advertising space in order to pay for the licensing and to make a profit (you know, like a magazine). A name change might then be in order.

I’d like to know:  1) What is “permission based content?”  2) What is the source of the image of the naked woman with the lamb, and why this picture?  A quick search of Google Images didn’t show up the picture.  You can imagine, though, what you get when your search terms are “girl, lamb, naked.”

Posted in Art, Articles, MetaBlog, My Life Online, Photography, You're Dead To Me Now | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment