There are several companies which either sell software and/or their watermarking services. Two of the better known companies are, Digimarc and Signum Technologies. Although, there seems to be no foolproof method to protect your images, these companies seem to offer methods more sophisticated than the norm.
Here is an excerpt from ZDNet about watermarking images:
“Using a commercial technology like Digimarc, you add a digital watermark or signature to each of your images. This information is invisible to the naked eye but can be quickly retrieved using a watermark reader, allowing you to prove your ownership rights to an image. The dialog box [at zdnet.com], for example, appears when you check a watermark in Adobe PhotoShop.”
“PhotoShop 5.5, for example, ships with Adobe ImageReady, which gives you access to Digimarc technology.”
Source: zdnet.com
Digimarc
From their site:
MarcSpider image tracking technology crawls the most highly trafficked public areas of the world wide Web, searching for Digimarc-watermarked images and reporting back details about when and where they are found.
Features
- Constantly searches the public Web for Digimarc-watermarked images
- Unlimited access to online reports about where your images are found
- Presents thumbnails of the images found, with links to the pages where MarcSpider discovered them
- Maintains an archive of image finds, searchable by date range, so you don’t miss information
- Combines Digimarc’s Web crawler with a data feed from one of the leading Web search engines, for broad Web coverage
Can be found at: digimarc.com
Signum Technologies
From their site:
Signum Technologies provides a range of advanced digital watermarking solutions for copyright protection and communication applications With SureSign watermarks, ownership can be proved even when substantial modification is made to the original map data and, because SureSign watermarks survive copying or output to printed copy, they add a further level of protection.
Can be found at: signumtech.com
Using Microsoft FrontPage
If you are using Frontpage, the first part of the Zdnet article referenced above will show you how to watermark your images in FrontPage Editor.
Here is the article: zdnet.com
GIMP Image Manipulation Software (It’s Free)
The free image manipulation software GIMP can be found at: gimp.org
Here is a discussion about ways to watermark images using the open source software GIMP: help.com
In conclusion, the ZDNet article referenced above states:
“Watermarking also has its limitations. First, the watermarks vanish if someone manipulates the image in a program like PhotoShop. More importantly, watermarking doesn’t prevent image copying – it simply makes copied images easier to track down.
“The best solution, then, may be to simply not put images on your pages that you don’t want to have copied. You might just display thumbnails of your images, for example, or superimpose the word Sample across the center of each.”
Lastly, some people may want to put up a lower quality resolution image as the display image.
I hope that this compilation of software information, links and quotes can be helpful to those readers who which to protect their images through watermarking.
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