If someone wants to buy my photo or simply learn more about me as a photographer, the watermark provides that opportunity. I use watermarks mostly for discovery purchases. The metadata can be stripped, the watermark can be cropped or masked. I strongly believe that if a person wants to steal my photo, there is nothing I can do. Once again and similar to how I use copyright metadata, I do not use watermarks solely for image protection. In my photography, I try to maintain a balance between protecting the image and the aesthetics. When I come across such a photograph, all I can see is the ugly watermark and I cannot enjoy the actual photo. My biggest complaint is that the majority of watermarks on the web ruin the artistic aspect of the photograph. I believe that 99% of photographers misuse watermarks. In general, I am not a big fan of watermarks. The second solution for protecting our photos is watermarks. What this means is that using metadata copyright presets is not enough when posting our images to social media. Related: Lightroom Import Presets: Optimizing the Workflow This is absolutely unfair but, it is what it is, and we must deal with it.
#Lightroom logo plus#
The bad news is that Google Plus is dead while the biggest offender flourishes. Google Plus was the friendliest for photographers because it compressed images using a very smart algorithm that preserved all the metadata included in each photo. I despise Facebook for that but consider it a necessary evil since I have to use it to promote my business. On top of that, it recompresses the image with extremely aggressive settings. When you upload an image to Facebook or post to Instagram, it strips all the metadata from your photo. The downside of using metadata copyright information is that many online platforms do not respect it.įacebook is the worst offender with regard to user images. I like the metadata approach for image protection because it is not intrusive, nor does it affect the aesthetics of our photographs and, depending on your needs, you can include plenty of information. In the last article, I addressed the issue of using Copyright Presets to embed copyright information into every photograph we take.