Hi there.
Picture poaching.
Some days ago on Twitter I was into a discussion on how people are annoyed that the pictures they post are harvested by porn collectors, reposted by others without their permission and more things close to that issue. You may recognise several of those things. Many people don’t want to share their own images because of that.
Some tips on how to protect your pictures.
There are ways to make your pictures less interesting for collectors, harvesters, call them what you want.
Shrink the size
People who are looking for pictures for their personal, lewd entertainment usually want big images. Full screen, high resolution shots. By resizing your images to something a lot smaller that is a step towards making them unappealing.
On my android phone I use an app called ImageShrink. The free version is great and does a great job. There is a similar app on the itunes store called image size. Resize your image to 480 x 320 pixels and your pictures are already a lot less interesting. For example, this picture:
is 300 pixels wide and 150 pixels high. Nothing wrong with it, you can see what’s happening – a man reading a book in a park – but hardly anyone would want to steal this for its quality.
Add some text
Yes, it is ugly but it is the ultimate way to make your pictures unappealing for poachers.
This picture is 480 pixels high and has text on it. Not pretty. Not exciting. But a lot safer from harvesters.
If you use Google to search “image resize program free” then you’ll find plenty of software to easily resize your images, even online ones. Note that online ones might not be the best choice because you can’t tell what happens with the pictures you upload to a site. The service might be wonderful but remember that the original might not be deleted until the owner of the site had ‘a look’ at it. Just something to be aware of.
The advantage of that also is that more and more people are on mobile devices. Small images download faster so they will love you for being kind on their data plan!
You can also see I added some filtering to the above image. It makes it more interesting (for me) but it also makes me a bit less recognisable. Play with filters a bit. E.g. snapseed on Android gives you a wide choice of those. I am certain Apple has something like that too, and you can find software for your PC for that as well. Just use your Google skills.
I hope this little ‘tutorial’ has given you a few ideas how to keep your images safe from porn gatherers.
Thanks. Good tips.
Great advice Paul.
Thank you for sharing.
Fabien
You’re most welcome. It just occurred to me that these things do help.