When I wrote about my Prashar Lake pictures getting copied, many of you suggested me to watermark it. I will have to go picture by picture but I am OK with it. Will it mess up my feeds completely for those who subscribe to this blog in a reader? Will it change the way google indexes them? Some of them are the first one to come up in a search and I am scared to lose that ranking. 😀
To watermark I would have to download and upload it again, right? Any tips much appreciated.
I can't think of an easy way to do it … good luck.
Think about it this way – The pics which have already been used without due credit to you, their status wont change. At best it will only prevent further such use of specifically your pictures. The guys would always have the option of using the previous pictures which have been uploaded (and not linked through your site).Why dont you apply the watermark to the new pictures only?
Hi Mridula,Watermarking old pictures will neither affect your ranking, nor messup your feeds. But it depends on how you do it. (I won't go into why) :)If you do it post by post, a. you'll spend hours and b. you'll mess the rss and c. search engines might register it as a new post. What you should do is go to the image directory (using ftp or file manager) and simply replace the old images there. Lemme know if you have questions. 🙂
I think about this from time to time, too. When I think about how many bloggers are out there, posting pictures online, and when I think of how many people have pictures posted on sites like Flicker, my head just starts to spin with the number of photographs floating around out there that anyone could take and use. And it will only get worse as more people get online! It is a conundrum indeed!
Bindu and VS thank you.Priyank you will hear from me soon!Kelly thanks for painting the larger picture.
I always forget to watermark. I think we all should.
Megha I think we all should, I do water mark all my new pictures but there are many old ones without one.
Hello Mridula, you just have to replace (overwrite) the old pictures with the watermarked ones, through ftp. Just make sure the filename is same. It wont affect your posts, rss feed or google ranking. I have many a times updated my pictures in a similar way.I am not familiar with blogger, but i hope ftp is allowed. If not, you may have to upload it post by post. But still it is the same as in replacing the images.Just do it one by one, whenever you get time.
i guess what priyank and roxy said makes sense. either way the page rank will not get affected (if u do it post-by-post the feeds may re-arrange as if its an edit, but its not a big deal) i was a bit too lazy to watermark my older pictures and started doing it only a year back. in any case, i keep the watermark to one corner and it can always be by-passed (by cropping).i believe, if there is a fear of ur images getting copied (and if u r planning to use it for some other purpose, like seling it to magazines … etc) its not prudent to keep ur full sized images in the blog. for most online purposes a smaller / resized version would do