What to do when your photos are stolen

It happens to everyone. Perhaps it happens more and more often these days. Either because people think that images that they find online are free to use (totally wrong) or because they think that the chances of being caught are very small (only too right).

So, you have found that someone has used your image, on-line, in print or in some other way.

Your photos have been "stolen", you have been subject to copyright theft, someone is infringing on your intellectual property - it has many names.

What should you do?

What you can do and how is slightly different depending on in which jurisdiction or which country you are.

The EPUK (Editorial Photographers United Kingdom & Ireland) recently published a very good article about it. It is of course focused on what you can (and should) do in the UK, but the advice is quite applicable in most places.

In short

• Find the infringement (breach of copyright, unautorised use) of your photograph, AND DOCUMENT IT CAREFULLY AND IN DETAIL
• Estimate how much you think you should be compensated for the unauthorised use, including at least: 1) license fee, plus 2) fee for unauthorised use
• Contact the infringer with an initial letter
• Claim money
• Get paid

Not as easy as that, but the article contains much good advice!

The article also contains sample letters to send to the infringer - very useful!

Read the full article here: Stolen photographs: what to do? on the EPUK site, written by Simon Crofts, photographer and lawyer.

There's even a pdf version of the article that you can download and file for when you need it...

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The joys and dangers of photos on Flickr - stolen photos

Flickr is certainly an important player in the world of both amateur and professional photography today.

For a photographer it can be a great tool to show his photos, although I have not really started using it for that yet. Have so far only done some experiments.

On the other hand it can also be a place where people do copyright infringements.

I recently happened to find a set of photos that I did of Alpha Estate Wine in northern Greece on Flickr.

Someone, a dishonest person using the Flickr pseudonym blackpr_tim, has published my photos in his "photo stream" (his picture pages on flickr).

It was quite easy to find since the file name contain our business name (bkwine). Otherwise it would not have been so easy since, I understand, Flickr strips out embedded metadata from the images. (Incredibly silly.)

Here's how it looked on this guy's photo stream, with BKWine's pictures on it (link to screen shot).

What to do?

First step: I contact, through Flickr messaging, blackpr_tim and ask that he remove the images. No answer. I wait. Still no answer.

I would certainly like to know who this "blackpr_tim" is! How can anyone with a straight face, just steal images like that? The pseudonym makes you think that it is someone working in PR (is there a Greek company called "Black PR"?). If he does work in PR he would deserve to be fired. A person working in PR and who does not understand copyright is in the wrong business.

So, having no response from blackpr_tim, what to do?

Look in the footer on the Flickr pages. There's a link called "report abuse". Well, I certainly thought this was abuse. But that's the wrong place to go.

There's another link that says "Copyright / IP Policy". That's the right place. Not quite obvious but not difficult to find either.

It gives you detailed instructions on what to do.

You have to follow their instructions to the exact detail and use the exact working requested, otherwise it won't work. It follows a legal proceeding called DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) that obliges contents hosters to remove material that is infringing, provided the correct procedure is followed.

So I wrote an email, taking care to use the correct wording and giving the exact locations of the images.

A few hours later I get a response back and the images have been removed. (They missed one but I am sure they'll fix that too.)

I'm impressed. Quite easy and very quick response.

But don't do things like this frivolously. If you are wrong (e.g. if it's not your images or if the person does have permission to post them) it may cost you dearly.

Problem solved!

I just wonder who this guy blackpr_tim is?

Don't know if Flickr will suspend his account or just remove my images. Somehow hope they do. At least it will cause him a bit more work to reestablish his Flickr presence...


Greece Alpha Estate Winery stock photography samples - Images by Per Karlsson

Alpha Estate Winery, Greece, stock photography samples, by Per Karlsson, BKWine.

THIS IS ONLY A SELECTION OF SAMPLES. Use the image SEARCH function to find more relevant photos.

Alpha Estate Winery (Ktima Alpha) is located in the village Agios Panteleimon, Amyndeon, north western Greece, viticultural appellation region Florina. The name of the appellation and wine region is Amyndeon. Alpha was one of the first private vineyards in the Amyndeon area in northern Macedonia in Greece established with a quality wine focus. It was founded by Angelos Iatridis, winemaker, and Makis Mavridis.

The main grape variety is xinomavro, with both classic vinification and carbonic maceration. Other grape varieties: syrah, making more international style wines, sauvignon blanc giving typical varietal character. Alpha also makes a sweet white wine based on malagousia and gewurztraminer.

All images © copyright Per Karlsson, BKWine. Images may not be used without our permission.

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Size matters. How to increase the size (Or: a short overview of a digital photography workflow)

Now that's a heading that verges on the silly, isn’t it?

I had a question today on “how do you uprez your files”. Here’s a little info. A little more than asked for perhaps.

Size is important when it comes to photography. The images have to be of sufficient size to be published. A frequent recommendation is that the “uncompressed” file size should be at least 48MB. What this means is that an 8-bit tiff file should take up at least that much space on the disk. Expressed in another way, this equates to approximately 3000 x 5000 pixels. If you are looking at a jpeg (jpg) then the file size will vary, perhaps between 8MB to 12MB. (If you need this is of course dependent on what you will use the photos for!)

Many cameras do not produce files of that size so you will have to make the files bigger (also called up-res, or up-rezz, or up-size or similar things).



Instead of just giving the simple answer I thought it could be worth while to explain in brief my full “developing” or processing workflow:

1. Shoot in raw. Always shoot in raw! (did you only shoot polarioids when using film cameras?)

This means that the photos must be processed after shooting. Yes, must. You cannot use a raw image as-is.

2. “Ingest”, i.e. move the files from the camera to the hard disks (yes, in plural. Backup is vital) change the names to your naming standard (important!) etc etc. I’ll skip the details of this.

3. Process the images with Capture One (a software from Phase One).

There are several different raw processing sw to choose from. The most popular is probably Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) that you get with Photoshop and Lightroom. My preference is clearly Capture One. My impression is that it gives better results and is faster to work with (speed matters too! Not only size. If you have a few thousand images to process it will rapidly make a huge difference).

However (and this is a big ‘but’): Capture One is difficult to get to grips with. But once you have figured out how it works, all the keyboard short cuts, commands etc it is really fast. And gives very good results. It's worth while to learn it.

Input to Capture One: raw file

Output: 16 bit (yes, 16) tiff file, in the original (camera) resuolution

4. Adjust the image in Photoshop

This may include additional colour/saturation adjustments, dust removal, cloning, etc etc. Or almost nothing.

The final step is to change it to an 8-bit tiff.

The 8-bit tiff becomes my “working original” from which I can make delivery copies. This is the file I put in my “develops” catalogue.

5. Make a delivery copy

This is where up-sizing comes in. If, for instance, a photo is supposed to go into a stock library like e.g. Alamy or my own BKWine Photography then it needs to be at least “48 MB uncompressed”. This, as explained above, means that the 8-bit tiff should be 48 MB. This tiff should then be converted to jpeg and sent to the library. Here’s what I do:

a) Up-size with Photoshop (“Image Size”) using the Bicubic Smoother option. How much you should upsize depends on the size of the original file and how big you need the result to be. If the 8-bit tiff is around 17MB (coming from a 6 megapixel camera) then you need to upsize around 173% to get to 48MB uncompressed. You will have to test to get the exact numbers right. (Note: sometimes it is said that you should upsize in 10% steps. Don’t!)

If the raw file is big enough out of the camera, you don’t need to do this. This is the case for some of the recent DSLRs (e.g. the Canon EOS 5D Mark ii) but for most cameras you need to uprez.

b) Save the file as a jpeg, quality 10 to 12 (maximum quality or close to maximum quality)

6. Send the file to the destination.

YOU’RE DONE!


A note on sharpening: I never do sharpening, at least not for stock photos. I’m not a specialist on the technology, but there seems to be an consensus that sharpening is a bad idea. You should only do sharpening once you know how the image will be used (what kind of printing and what size) and you never do for stock. So, don’t do sharpening!

A note on noise: If you have used very high ISO (say, 800 or more) you may need to use some noise reduction. I’d recommend a dedicated noise reduction software to do that. You can also do it in Photoshop but I prefer e.g. Noise Ninja.

A note on organisation: You need to catalogue files with a DAM system (Digital Asset Management) but that’s a big subject in itself. I am currently looking for a new DAM solution since my old one (Extensis Portfolio) seems to have decided to leave the independent photographers’ market.

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