request: little advice RE watermarks

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Bolerus

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Name
Mike
Edit My Images
Yes
hello all

I work for an antique pottery shop.

we have a live website (www.burslemantiques.co.uk) (posted the address so you can see what im talking about, not as a marketing ploy - hope that doesent break any rules, if it does say so and i will just host 1 pic and post that instead)

now, recently we have found a few companies are stealing our pictures and selling them on their web site as their own.

Of course that means that it is an extra avenue for sales (the company woudl have to buy the item off us after all ) but all the downloading of pics etc is taking us over our monthly bandwidth limit and actually costing us money.

The only way i can think of stopping it would be to put some kind of water mark on the pictures so it is obvious that it comes from us and not some 3rd party seller.

and here is the question :-

does any body have any advice, or perhaps a link to a good way to do this. Ideally we need soemthing that doesent obscure the items for sale but also wouldnt be easily removed.

Thanks in advance

mike
 
This sort of thing might be suitable? I think the link is okay under the circumstances :)

clicky
 
The others are using links to your pictures to sell stuff on their sites? easy fix, change the link to the real picture on your site and watermark it as you have already suggested and upload a dummy image to the original link of some text saying "image theft is theft and would you deal with a thief?"
 
Useful page that Dod - cheers!
 
stolen.jpg
 
steep, great idea but how woudl i do that? (hope you dont mind i just stole your stolen image)

im not exactly great with web sites (in fact im learning at the moment so i can make more changes to the web site - i have made a few already )


DOD thanks m8, exactly the kind of thing i was looking for, I asume (havent tried the tutorial yet - will do this afternoon) I could just reduce the opacity of the mark so it is a less in your face but still there :)

thanks guys, cant believe how quick you all responded
 
think i may have explained a little in corectly, maybe,.

from what i can see, they are downloading our pics (right click save as i guess) then putting them on their own site and selling them on. That isnt in essence a problem except they are killign our alowed bandwidth with our web page hosts
 
Bolerus said:
steep, great idea but how woudl i do that? (hope you dont mind i just stole your stolen image)
Click to expand...

What Steeps suggesting will only work if they're linking directly to images which are hosted on your webspace. If they're downloading them and installing them on their own webspace you can't.

Easiest way to check is simply go to their site, look at one of the images and right click>properties. That will give you the address it's hosted at. If it's your website they're "hotlinking" and you can do what steep suggests. Your own web host might actually provide a facility to prevent it.
 
funnily enough i was looking at using an htaccess file to stop spiders last week, but every time I put on into the root of our web page, the web page stopped working, gave an error
 
robots.txt is the file you need to add to control spiders crawling your site.

.htaccess can be used to prevent external sites from opening an image, in the link mattyh posted it's the first section you need to use to stop hotlinking of the images.

However, are you sure the other sites are hotlinking to them - if you have access to the logs for your site you can quickly check through them and see if other sites are linking to images. If that's not happening then the other sites probably just saved the image and are using their own server to host them in which case it won't be affecting your bandwidth usage at all.
 
I had a similar problem on my website. I just put some text over the image (my website address and copyright owned by...) with photoshop. I put the opacity down so that it didn't distract, a colour that blended well, and you can also choose where to position the text then too. That way it is not obviously there, but if they try to download it then they will have your watermark on top.
 
If they are saving them and using them on their website then that will not affect your bandwidth at all, you'll need to look elsewhere for the cause of that. However to stop them saving and using your images then use a watermark as per your original idea and suggested above ^
 
Re bandwidth, I've noticed that some of the images on the rare item pages 1&2 have very large file sizes, 40-80k each which is very big for 130x200px images, the images on later pages are all much smaller, around the 6-10k mark. I don't know how much bandwidth you're allowed but if you cut down on file size you'll cut down on bandwidth usage.
 
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