Please note all photos on this blog now bear a watermark logo. I urge you to do the same with your photos, if you have a blog. Someone with a MySpace account stole a photo of Beatrix as a newborn and passed it off as a photo of her own newborn daughter. I received the tip via an email. The tipster who emailed me had been suspicious of the motives and story of the person who posted the picture. After searching and digging through photobucket and Google, this person found me and warned me. He/she (not revealing) deserves a huge thanks.
I am still amazed how a complete stranger made this connection, but I am grateful. We contacted MySpace. The photo was removed from the account this morning. I do not know if it was removed by MySpace or if the photo-thief removed it on her own initiative.
Again, either put a watermark logo on your photos to discourage unauthorized use or do not post photos of your families at all—an option I am seriously considering.
Good reminder! I used to post watermarks, and then got lazy and stopped doing it. I will have to remember to do so from now on.
How despicable that someone would do that!
Can you point us to any how-to instructions about making watermarks?
Creepy that someone stole the photo, amazing that the tipster found you (why were they suspicious anyway)?
As you obviously know, all you need to do is inform My Space or Yahoo or whichever company makes the illegal posting possible and they have to take it down immediately, no questions asked.
Wow! Thank you for letting me know about this! How odd and very sad!
Steph
Thanks for the tip! How do you put watermarks on?
Thanks for sharing that! I am soo glad someone alerted you. How sick and sad it is when someone does that.
Things like this just make me want to quit the internet.
What a strange thing for that woman to do. Yea, how do you do the watermarks?
My gosh, will you ever create a masthead that I don’t like? I love this new (or at least new to me) hen and chicks one! Re: the watermark on photos – this a great tip. Would you like to enter it into the carnival of bloggin I’m hosting tomorrow? (just use the Mr linky in the post).
My husband is going to post a tutorial on how to make watermarks at his blog—hopefully sometime soon.
Very odd. I guess I labor under the delusion that my blog is so obscure no one would bother to go there to steal . . . I’ll have to start doing the watermark thing.
Oh how weird that somebody did that!! Nothing is too farfetched anymore, it seems.
I look forward to the tutorial on your DH’s blog.
Scary! I haven’t posted pics of my child and now I know why…just had a bad feeling about it.
A chick from Turkey stole a picture of my nine year old daughter to write a post bashing the US and discuss how evil we were and we were the cause of them not getting any rain, blah, blah, blah…
When I confronted her about it (my computer savvy hubby took care of the photo) she was so offended that I accused her of stealing! Her exact quote was “it’s not like I broke into your house and took it out of your bedroom drawer”.
Um. Yeah, it is.
That’s creepy that someone was saying your baby was theirs. I just don’t get it!
This is just so….so….weird. As an avid user of the internet and of photo hosting sites, I am constantly aware of these types of things happening. People tell me all the time to watermark my stuff, be careful, etc.
My philosophy has been just that creepy stuff happens so rarely…that I just don’t care. I will be more mindful now 😉 Thanks for sharing and for the reminder.
(found this post linked to Heth’s site at Laundry Pile)