Online image theft has become a common practice. One should know that image theft is everywhere, and today anyone who uploads his/her images is at the risk of image plagiarism. Many people are even going through an identity crisis because of image theft.
You can see many accounts on social media using images of celebrities or other common people to fake their identities and catfish. If you are concerned about your images/pictures being stolen and misused by another person, you should take precautions to save yourself from image theft and catfishing accusations.
In this guide, we would tell you about the different tips using which you can reduce image theft cases.
Tips to protect yourself from image theft
Here we have listed some important tips using which you can protect yourself from image theft.
- Upload your pictures in low resolution!
The first tip is, of course, a simple and effective one. You should try and upload images that are low in resolution. You can use different image manipulation tools to reduce the image’s quality before you publish or upload it. Catfishing and image theft are usually made on high-quality images. Duplicators are always looking for high-quality content, so you can stop them from copying your content if it is lower in quality. If you don’t know how to reduce the image’s quality, you can also use the searchbyimage.org technique and tools to find a relevant image of lower quality.
- Add watermarks to your image!
Adding watermarks to your image would also help you get saved from a hopeless case of catfishing and image theft. Plagiarizers would never copy and use the images that have watermarks on them. Watermarks can indeed be removed using modern image editing tools, but no one has the time to spend hours downloading and editing an image with a paid tool.
Furthermore, even if an image’s watermark is removed, it can still be caught plagiarism if you use the online reverse image search tools. In the watermarks, we would recommend you point out that the image is protected with copyrights. The top three common watermarks on images would include:
- Image title
- Name of the creator
- Copyright notice
- Block the right-click functionality
You might have tried downloading images from different sources yourself. Please don’t be shy about it as everyone has done it for private use. If you don’t want your image to be downloaded and misused, then the best way to avoid it is by blocking the right-click function on the image.
If you block the right-click access, you would be able to put off many image thieves. Still, you must know that you cannot take away the screenshot option from them, so despite being a clever way to avoid image theft, it is still not perfect and fully secure if you don’t use the special plug-ins for this purpose. This brings us to the next important tip!
- Stop thieves by adding screenshots blocking Plug-ins
Now, this is one of the best ways to avoid image plagiarism and theft. You can easily stop thieves from downloading and stealing your images when applying the right click blocker and the screenshot blocker plug-ins. You must find the plug-ins that can help you block screenshots. These plug-ins can easily be added to your webpages and on your WordPress websites. It is one of the accurate ways to do so.
- Register copyright for all your images!
This is a basic tip that we would give to all our writers. We want you to understand that registering your images with copyrights would help you save them from plagiarism. Still, if you catch someone plagiarizing or stealing your images, you can easily call them out in the court of law with the copyright registration as proof. There are many copyright registration companies like Concensum on the web that can help you register copyrights.
- Using reverse image search
If you use the modern reverse image search tools, you can easily find image plagiarism and theft. The reverse image search tool by Duplichecker can help you authenticate your images. You must open the tool on your browser and click on the uploading options to grab the images you want to check for plagiarism and duplication. The image search tool by Duplichecker would compare your image or the image URL with the database of multiple search engines and social platforms and would get you results that are relevant to your input.
There are many more uses of reverse image search other than finding image theft and plagiarism, and we would suggest all of you try it.
For more details regarding image theft and its effects on your identity, we would suggest you stay tuned!