Stopping Scammers from Exploiting Your Photos

Most of us love sharing our personal photos and creative work on multiple social media platforms for various purposes. However, it’s not safe at all. Once you share anything on social media and make it public, anyone can exploit it for personal gain.

Therefore, always protect your identity and use different strategies to keep scammers away from your data, especially photos. In this blog, we will discover the best ways to safeguard photos from scammers.

How Scammers Can Exploit Your Photos?

Create Fake Social Media Profiles

If your photos are readily available online, anyone can easily save them and create fake profiles using your name and photos on multiple social media platforms. In fact, many scammers do it on a regular basis. They create fake profiles using others’ names, add their friends and family members, talk to them, earn their trust, and ask for financial assistance. Unfortunately, many fall into their traps. Similarly, many even create profiles on dating apps.

Damage Reputation

By creating fake profiles with your name, scammers or your competitors can ruin your reputation. They can share inappropriate content or engage in deceptive activities on those profiles. Such things can defame you, and you may not even know about them until the damage is done. In the worst-case scenario, they can contact your acquaintances, spread misinformation, and ruin your relationships as well. That’s why it’s suggested to always protect your work from scammers.

Selling Your Work

Many photographers, e-commerce store owners, and artists post on social media that scammers and content stealers have used or sold their creative work. Actually, scammers download photos from multiple online platforms and post them on stock platforms or other stores, claiming it’s their original work. This blatant theft robs the original content creators and denies them the recognition they deserve. They generate profit from others’ hard work, but the creator doesn’t know about it at all.

How to Protect Your Photos Online?

Adjust Privacy Settings

Your privacy settings are your first defense against all scammers and content thieves. Almost every social media platform allows users to adjust these settings according to their needs. If you don’t want others to see your photos and posts, keep your profile and all its posts private. This way, you can easily control who can watch your content. This simple practice can also keep lots of scammers away from your content.

Similarly, if you are a content creator and want to share your content on your website, turn off the right-click and screenshot options. Often, photographers and designers don’t capitalize on this utility. As a result, scammers download and use their work for their own benefit.

Watermark Creative Works Before Sharing

You would have seen many content creators add watermarks to their photos before posting them anywhere. It’s another outstanding technique to safeguard your work. 

Generally, scammers who want to download and use others’ content don’t pick photos protected by watermarks. Even if they download those photos, they cannot claim their ownership. Watermarking is one of the best techniques for protecting visual content.

However, while applying watermarks, cover the main objects with watermarks. Otherwise, scammers can crop and use your content. Also, it should have your name, logo, social media ID, or any other thing that shows who the real content creator is. Watermarks signal ownership. So, it should have your name on it.

Search by Images Frequently

In order to know where your photos have been uploaded or if someone has created a fake profile using your photos, search by image using an advanced image search tool. This way, you can easily spot all the web pages and social media profiles using your visual content.

The reverse image search tools use AI technology to scan images, understand their content and context, and fetch the same or similar photos from the web. So, a single image search query can help you spot all platforms or pages where your pictures are posted. Once they are on your screen, explore them, analyze the context, and take the required actions against content stealers.

Compress Photos

Compressing photos before sharing them online can help you protect your work from content stealers. They search for the best photos with the highest quality, as they can exploit them properly. If you are a designer, photographer, or content creator, never share your work in the best quality. Otherwise, people will download it freely and sell it to others.

Compressed images are actually lower in resolution, making them less suitable for professional reuse or printing. This discourages scammers from exploiting your photos for commercial or fraudulent purposes. However, while compressing photos, be mindful of striking a balance; compress enough to protect your image but not so much that it compromises the visual appeal.

Conclusion

Stealing others’ photos and creative work is quite common these days. Unfortunately, many people don’t know how to protect their work or if someone has already stolen it. If you are also worried about it, use the simple tactics mentioned in this article, and you will be able to keep all your photos away from scammers.