I love sharing pictures of my family, and especially of my daughter and of my son (interested? See them at Flickr). You may have noticed – especially if you have seen my Flickr photos or read my personal blog, jenn.nu – that I watermark each and every one of my photos. I do this because unfortunately, there are unscrupulous people out there who think nothing of taking photos of babies and children and claiming them as their own relation.
So what is watermarking? Watermarking is a method of protecting photos – easily identifying them to viewers as belonging to an individual or a company. The following is an example of a watermarked photo:

I was introduced to this “dark side” – photo theft – in the early spring of 2005, when a concerned blog reader contacted me privately to inform me that she had seen photos of my then five month old daughter, Alyssa, posted on another person’s livejournal account. I went there and sure enough, there were photos of my daughter – hospital photos, newborn photos, and so on and so forth – all over this woman’s livejournal account. This woman claimed the photos were of her “cousin”. Cousin. Right.
I contacted livejournal and the free website the woman used to host the photos, and both accounts were terminated. I then pulled all of my photos off of the internet and watermarked them before putting them back up. Ever since I have watermarked every single photo that has passed from my computer to the internet.
And I suggest you do the same. A very easy tutorial that shows how to watermark photos in Adobe Photoshop – and do batch photo watermarking – can be found at Photoshop 911.
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Name: Alyssa
Name: Ryan
