One of your main concerns as an artist is surely how to protect your art online from being stolen. Indeed, with all the social media and image sharing platforms around, it’s getting harder and harder to prevent theft and protect your work from being copied online. In this post, I’m going to show you the Best 7 TIPS for how to protect your work online, how to watermark your art, and how to add invisible copyright information!
If you’re a visual artist, you know that sharing your artworks online has never been as easy as today. There are lots of social media networks and art websites where you can post your work.
You’ve surely experienced the downside of that as well: Once you decided to upload and showcase your art on the web, there’s no way to prevent it from getting stolen.
Because the sad truth is there will always be people using your image without asking you for permission or crediting you. People might alter your image and then repost it pretending to be the creator of it. Somebody might cut out stuff from your image and make it available as a resource for free!
Believe me, I’ve seen it all happen to my pictures!
Many times such things don’t happen with malicious intent or for profit. It’s because people don’t understand that they cannot just use anything they find online, and they don’t know how to correctly credit the artist.
Nevertheless, as an artist, you want to be sure that your art is protected online!
So, How To Protect Your Art Online?
Let’s start off by facing the facts: there is no way that will guarantee a 100% protection of your artwork online! There simply isn’t.
The only sure-fire protection would be to not post anything online. But then you wouldn’t be able to share your beautiful works with other people, admire other artists’ works, get inspired, and get in touch with a whole community of art lovers, curators, buyers, etc.!
Then, What Can You Do?
Well, I have gathered the 7 Best Tips for you that will help you protect your visual art on the Internet!
But before we get into it, there are surely some other questions you’ve wondered about, like…
How To Protect Your Artwork On Instagram?
When you upload your art (or any other image) to Instagram, you retain the ownership of your content.
That’s already a great thing (and should be a matter of course). But then it’s not that easy…
By uploading photos, you grant Instagram certain license rights to your pictures.
Basically, with each picture posted, you grant the social media network a non-exclusive Royalty Free License that is transferable, sub-licensable and universal. Meaning, you automatically allow Instagram to use your content worldwide.
Automatically… because when signing up to the platform you agreed to these licensing conditions by accepting Instagram’s Terms of Service.
It’s common practice for social networks to permit the re-sharing of content. Thus, IG’s ‘repost’ feature enables users to share anything on the platform – as long as the original is credited.
Apart from that, no need to worry… Instagram is highly unlikely to use this image license to do anything other than that with your pictures. Because using your images for any other purpose or even selling them for profit would lead to a huge outrage in the community and put users off the network.
But…
With that being said, let’s jump right into the 7 Tips that’ll show you how to protect your art online!
TOP 7 Tips How To Protect Your Art Online
WATERMARK YOUR ART
Watermarking your art is one of the best ways to protect your work online.
When I say watermark, please don’t think of a huge emblem covering up the whole picture.
No. A watermark can be discrete, nicely designed, and doesn’t have to interfere with the look and feel of your image.
Large watermarks do your picture no service. On the contrary, they ruin the overall look, and discourage social interaction and sharing.
A watermark has to be only as big as to allow people to see who created the work.
However, no watermark is impossible to edit out. All you can do is place your watermark somewhere where it’s considerably harder and more time-consuming to remove it.
‘Then why should I put a watermark at all if it doesn’t really protect my art from being stolen?’ you might say now. Let me tell you.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has made it illegal to remove copyright information from images. This also includes watermarks. The DMCA enables you to recover for the removal of a watermark, if you can prove that the watermark was removed or changed.
So, adding a watermark gives you more legal protection against copyright infringement and the removal of a watermark is one more thing to sue the infringer over…
How To Watermark Your Art?
I recommend you design your personal watermark that you include in all your images. Your watermark can be similar to your artist logo, your artist name or signature.
Your personal watermark should include the Copyright Sign © and the year when your image was created.
If you like, you can add a link to your website or to your account on your main art sharing platform. This way, you also offer people the possibility to contact you and ask for permission if they wish to use your image.
As an example, your personal watermark could look something like this:
When choosing a place for your watermark in your image, make sure to not put it in the bottom corner or any other spot where it can be easily cropped or edited out.
I used to put my watermarks in ‘bottom corners’ or plain areas of my images in order to keep them as unobtrusive as possible.
However, if you want a stronger protection for your artwork to prevent theft online, it’s a good idea to use two decent watermarks in your image. I’ve come to add one watermark that is more noticeable and then another one that’s less obvious.
Find an area in your image where the watermark is particularly hard to edit out. Look for areas that include lots of details and different colors. This is where you would place your first, less visible – but harder to edit out – watermark.
You can reduce the opacity of your watermark, change the colors or use a different blending mode. You want your watermark to blend in nicely but still be noticeable!
After that, look for another spot in your image to place the second watermark that will be more obvious (and comparably easier to edit out). Leave it more prominent so people can recognize the creator of the work and understand that it’s copyrighted.
ADD INVISIBLE COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
My second tip is to add invisible copyright information to your image files. There are a couple of image viewing and editing applications that allow you to add such information.
I personally like to use Adobe Bridge to add invisible copyright details to my works.
This so-called Meta Data allows you to enter various information, such as the creator of the image, city and country where the work was created, title and description of the image, your email and a link to your website. You can even add rights usage terms and a credit line.
But first and foremost, you can define the copyright status of your picture by choosing between Unknown, Public Domain and Copyrighted!
Once the status is set to Copyrighted, the © sign will appear in front of the file name every time someone opens the image in a graphics program, such as Photoshop and the like.
Go to File > Save for Web in the top menu bar. Once you’ve clicked Save for Web, a file saving window will pop up that allows you to select metadata on the right side bar.
By clicking on the dropdown menu, you can choose None, Copyright, Copyright and Contact Info, All Except Camera Info and All.
UPLOAD LOW-RESOLUTION IMAGES ONLY
Another thing you want to do, in particular if you’re selling prints of your art, is to protect images from being copied online and printed off. Apart from adding watermarks, one thing you can do to stop people printing off your work is to only upload low-resolution images.
Low-resolution files are comparably harder to scale up to a size that would allow quality prints of your images without permission.
Make sure to upload image files with no more than 72 dpi and no larger than 1000 px on the longest side. Use JPEG to save your files because the format cannot be scaled up without quality loss.
In Photoshop and other apps, you can choose the quality for your JPEG files when saving the image. In Photoshop, go to Files and click Save for Web. In the popup window, go to the right sidebar and select JPEG.
Right below, you can pick the quality you want to save your image in. You can toggle between High and Medium and play around with the quality slider. Oftentimes, Medium is totally sufficient for uploading pictures to the web. If you’re not sure, you can always check on the left what your image looks like with the selected settings.
If you want to sell prints of your image or the image file itself, you can always tell users that a high quality version is available to buy.
ADD A COPYRIGHT MESSAGE
As I mentioned above, many people are not aware of infringing the copyright when reposting an artwork and not crediting the artist correctly.
Adding a copyright notice next to your images lets people clearly understand that your work is copyrighted.
A great way to do that is to use the copyright symbol ©. The symbol is generally understood by the public and makes it immediately clear that there’s a copyright involved.
And don’t get it wrong: You don’t need to register the copyright to your images in order to use the symbol!!
For example, you can add a line below your posts that reads ‘Copyright © 2024 YourName’.
You can also let people know that they have to credit you when they share your images.
KEEP DIGITAL RECORDS OF YOUR WORK
This is especially important for traditional artists.
If you’re a traditional artist, make sure you keep digital records of when your works were created and published.
Also, make sure to keep the sketches of your works, in case you do sketching. Sketches enable you to prove that the work is yours and you are the original creator of it.
If you’re a digital artist, these things are mostly done automatically for you. ☺
With each file you create, the original date of creation is saved along with it. If you composite your work in any application like Photoshop, all the different layers are proof to document your work process from the beginning up to the final creation.
Just make sure to always keep your original PSD files!
POSTS WORK IN PROGRESS (WIP) SHOTS
Posting work in progress shots helps you to demonstrate without doubt that you were the one creating the work!
WIPs can be photos or videos, such as time lapses of you working on a particular piece of art.
You can also include yourself in the photos of your WIPs. People like to see peaks of how the artist creates their works!
MONITOR YOUR CONTENT & TAKE ACTION
My last tip: Do a quick search on Google or any other search engine from time to time to see if your work is somewhere being used without your permission.
You can use Google’s image search, type in your artist name or the title of a specific work and see what comes up.
You can repeat the same process on any other picture-posting platform, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
There are also websites like pixsy.com and tinyeye.com that allow you to do a reverse image search to find stolen work.
Once you’ve discovered any unauthorized use, take action!
Sometimes it might be enough to just contact the person. On user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, DeviantArt, Etsy, etc., you can send a DMCA take down notice. Usually, they’ll take down copyright infringing work pretty quickly.
However, sometimes you might not get around hiring a lawyer to take legal steps…
But if you’ve applied all the 7 Tips for how to protect your art online, let’s hope that won’t be necessary!
How do you protect your art online? Have you also had bad experiences with people stealing your artwork? Let me know in the comments!
If you found these tips helpful, please share them with other artists! Stay safe, Angie 🙋
