Lives of Photographs, 50

[peteryoung]

It's kind of weird knowing via Flickr Stats that someone has used Google Translate to render the page for this photo and caption of Burmese Karen Paduang girls into Polish (and that my Flickr ID translates as 'rosnąco'). And at this point I begin to wonder if the photo will soon be appearing without credit or payment in something like a Polish guide book to Thailand or a magazine article... that kind of theft happens more often than you might imagine, and it's virtually impossible to trace unless you're lucky/unlucky enough to run into the end result by accident, as recently happened to a photographer friend in Malaysia. Maybe it's time to start using Flickr's spaceball gif as online image protection.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

You're a likely target for that, your photos are of very high quality and are always very interesting. It's so unfortunate, but I think you ought to protect your work at Flickr.

[willplant.livejournal.com]

tineye.com shows some promise but their search index is not big enough (yet)

it is still in beta and requires a sign-up,

to quote from their FAQ:

"How does TinEye work?

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized."

For clarity's sake, i have no connection with tineye and, as yet, have not had a successful image search for any of my pics - which is almost certainly because my pics are not interesting/well known enough to be ripped off.

Obviously this wouldn't solve your issue of finding out about illicit dead-tree editions of your work.