A question to photographers

[quilby]

Would you pay about 50$ a month for a web service that would track where your photos are being used on the internet?
If you know tineye.com, it would be sort of like that. But you would be allowed to upload as many photos as you would like. The service will crawl the whole web every day, and when it finds one of your photos being used it would send you an email.

What do you think about such a web service? Do you have any advice / features you would like to add?
How much would you be willing to pay for something like this?
How helpful will it be to you?

Thanks for your time!

 

[musicaleCA]

If it could guarantee a certain reliability in matching images to each other (say someone futzed with contrast, saturation, and slapped text and a logo onto it, would your service catch it too?), then perhaps, yes. I can see that it'd be useful for tracking down people who violate copyright.

 

[quilby]

Yes it will be just as good as tineye for tracking images- see Cool Searches - TinEye

These are only some of the things that it will be able to find-
Resized images
Cropped
Changing the colors
Cropping the image and then putting it in a different image
Overlaying text on the image (as long as the text doesnt take up too much space in the final image)
Completely erasing parts of the image
Rotating the image.

Basically if someone takes your image and photoshops it to the point where it is still recognizable, we will be able to find it.

 

[gsgary]

No tineye didn't find any of mine

 

[musicaleCA]

Yep, I'd go for it. If I were really worried about people stealing my images. (TBH, I don't think my images are worth stealing yet, but assuming I get to a level where they are, hells yes I'd use it.)

 

[quilby]

No tineye didn't find any of mine

But we are going to be better than them. What do you think about the idea though?
Also tineye only lets you upload 1 pic at a time.
We will let you upload you whole photo collection at once. Also, we will check your photo collection against the pics we find on the internet every day, so that you will be aware that someone is using your photograph as soon as they do.

 

[KmH]

I've been less than impressed with Tineye's results, but they admit their database is still very small because they have crawled only a small fraction of the web. They also acknowledge there are many sites they can't even access because the content is protected by robots.txt or is otherwise uncrawlable.

So, if your service is "just as good as Tineye", no, it's not worth $50 a month to me.

 

[quilby]

Right, crawling the whole web is not possible.
But we will crawl as much as possible (more than tineye though).

How much would you be willing to pay for a service like this? $10?

 

[DSPhotography]

Say I upload my image as "model-a-shoot02" on my gallery and someone right-click > saves and then uploads it to their site as "hotchick2",would it catch that?

 

[quilby]

Yes it would catch that easily. It will also catch the picture if the guy takes model-a-shoot2 and photoshops the head to a different head, and then saves it in a different file format.

 

[Actor]

The service will crawl the whole web every day...

I don't think that's possible. The web is terribly large and terribly slow. I don't know how many sites there are but the protocol provides for up to four billion. I don't have the numbers but I suspect it would take a Cray to crawl the entire web in one day.

 

[manaheim]

Well, I suppose it would be possible but $50 a month? I doubt many would pay that much. Some, perhaps.

 

[UUilliam]

I would pay your second suggestion, $10

This method isn't 100% reliable
The best way to stop people using your image is when uploading, compress it so it is all fringed and slap a big copyright watermark over the image then put random dots every few spots (easily done if you use photoshop and you create an action, it will do it to ALL images of the same width & length and you can batch commit it therefore people wouldn't even want to use your image, the only problem doing this is that it may make the image un attractive thus lower sales / bad critique