Find out if your images were stolen - stop image theft

Are you active on social media? Probably. The moment you post pictures on a public account on social media, you face the possibility of image theft. It is far too easy to copy, download or screenshot the pictures of others. Most of the time, you will not even find out that somebody stole your pictures.

You could watermark your pictures or upload them in a lower resolution. You probably do not want a watermark right over your picture, so you would put it somewhere on the sides. That is easy to cut away. Also, there are apps out there that can make a watermark disappear. So this is no solution.

Posting pictures with low resolution lowers the quality of your pictures so much that it affects the appearance. Neither a solution. So what to do?

Let us give these people a thought that become thiefs and take your pictures. Who are those people? I believe in the good in people even though I know that it is not always true. Still, that is why I believe that a lot of people do not reflect on what intellectual property means. They see a picture they like on Instagram, screenshot it and post it on their own Instagram feed. They do not understand that you never gave anybody permission to use your pictures just because you posted them online. Posting online seems to be a form of consent to them. Obviously that is not true. So an easy way of preventing "accidental" theft is to be clear about it. Write on your homepage or social media bio very clear that your pictures are not aloud to be used or that you want to be tagged, that you want to be credited etc.

So far I have been lucky. Even though I have had my pictures taken without my permission, I have been able to solve that problem with a nice but firm DM. In the cases I know about, my pictures were used as profile pictures of other Instagram accounts or they were posted on the feed of other Instagram accounts without giving credit. When I contacted these persons the problem disappeared. What scares me though is that my images might get stolen and I won't get to know about it at all. Especially scrary to me is if pictures with my kids would be taken. Btw, that is one reason why I stopped completely showing my girls in my pictures.

However, there are tools that will help detecting stolen pictures. You can use google reverse picture search. Here you upload your picture and google searches the net and shows you where it is used. From here you can decide how you want to proceed: accept, contact and tell that you want to be credited, send a takedown notice etc. Unfortunately, here you can just upload one picture a time.

If you want to bulk upload your whole gallery you can use Pixsy. Pixsy helps to scan the web and to find where your images are used. It is free to open an account and to scan for your images. If you find unauthorized usage, Pixsy's services include tools to tackle that problem. They can send a takedown notice in your name and they can even handle an infringement case process to recover fees if you want them to. Those legal services do cost though. Still, I found it extremely valuable to get to know if and where my images were stolen in the first place. You will be able to see on which website in which country your image appeared and if it is in commercial purpose.

What is the conclusion? It is not completely possible to prevent image theft. But there are more and more tools that make it easier to detect image theft and to react. The digital artist scene just recently came up with a completely new concept of how to sell art due to the problems with image theft: NFTs: non-fungible tokens. But that is a topic for another blog post.

I would love to hear you experiences with image theft and how you dealt with it. If you know more ways or better ones to handle image theft, please let me know.