I’ve had a rough morning, troubled with these questions: do I need to protect my pictures? And if so, what’s the best way to do it?

Here I am, uploading my nice photos (if I may say so myself) for all to see. Others might use them to generate profit. I guess if I saw some of that profit I’d be singing a different tune… The biggest problem with this online world, is that it’s practically impossible to prevent this. I can watermark the pictures – but that can be easily removed or ruin the photo. I can make them smaller (harder to enlarge) but then both of my readers will suffer too. I can add a copyright notice, but then someone from the other side of the world might be using my picture as is and I will never know.

The Internet is an amazing place. The source of my “problem” with copyrighting pictures is also the Internet’s advantage. I’ll admit I used pictures I got off a google search for various private usages (a Facebook event or something). But I have two things to say about that: I never tried to pass something like that as mine, and more importantly: I won’t use it in this blog. The only picture in this blog which isn’t mine is one I got off Wikipedia after making sure the image is released into public domain, and still it was a hard thing for me to do (but I was too lazy drawing it myself for the DOF tutorial).

For the time being, I decided on the third option. I didn’ want to “damage” my precious photos by watermarking or shrinking them beyond recognition.  So now I have a Copyright Notice page. I’ve also added a link at the bottom of all pages in this blog to that page. Will this suffice? I hope so.

I’ll end with an ode to the Israeli sunset: