I’m apparently REALLY out of the loop. I even went over and commented on a couple of Danielle’s posts, and never even had a CLUE about what was happening to her. I feel just AWFUL that I was so oblivious.
For those who hadn’t heard: Danielle’s family picture was used in a Czech Republic ad without her consent.
You can read all about it in her post, Stolen Picture, on her blog, Extraordinary Mommy.
Needless to say, this situation has had me appalled, shocked, and downright FREAKED! I’ve been a little generous with pictures coming from ,the new camera as of late, and have left these pictures big so that you, my friends, could see. Now? Absolutely not.
So, for the past four hours I’ve been working super hard to go back and watermark every picture on this blog of my family and me. It’s been grueling! Painstaking! My eyes want to bleed they’re so tired right now.
But I will not give up. This will get done as soon as I can get it done. But I won’t have something like this happen to me, with pictures of my children somewhere I don’t authorize, no way Jose.
Now, before we even talk further about watermarking, do you allow the public to access your photo albums? Are they marked private? Check out your settings in your accounts right now on all your album sites. I bet they’re set to default settings in which, anyone can access your pictures and download them! Set them up as private, set them up with a password. Ensure every picture you have is safe against just anyone getting them.
As for watermarking your photos, if you use Blogger, like me, and have used Blogger’s Image Upload for your blog posts, the easiest way to watermark those images, that I’ve found, is to access your Picasa album through your Dashboard, and one-by-one upload them to a new folder in a Photobucket account. Why Photobucket? Because you can add text right onto the image uploaded, so you can upload everything right there, add the text on it all right there, and then change the image url’s in each of your blog posts.
*TIP #1* Please note that when changing your url, you might want to think about removing the “a href” tags so that your image is no longer clickable, either.
*TIP #2* You will also need to remove an “id” code that Blogger puts in each of their images. It will no longer apply if you change the url to a Photobucket link (or another photo storage site)
I’ve heard other ladies saying they use Paint Shop Pro
or PhotoShop
to watermark their images. Perhaps from the start, maybe, or from here that would work, but for images already uploaded, I wanted order, I didn’t want to have to fish down all the photos in my folders. In Picasa whatever is there is what I used, and I would go right down the line in transferring to Photobucket, and then straight down the line in watermarking them. Tedious but will be well worth it when it’s over. (whenever that will be)
In the meantime, I will be plugging along to get this done, and hope and pray that no one has taken our photos in the time they’ve been available for the taking.
What about you? Do you watermark? How do you do it? What programs do you own? If you don’t watermark, will you now because of this recent issue?
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