JeremyP's Blog

Only the other day I was checking the stats for my web site and I noticed that there was a referrer from a forum so I decided to check it out. A poster to the forum had posted one of my images (in fact the one that also appears in my profile on this blog) and made some comment that he thought whitty.

I didn't mind the fact that he had made the comment - the worst form of insult is to be ignored - but he had used my image in an inline image tag so there was no attribution. Not only that, but because the image source was my web site, he was using my bandwidth. If he had posted a normal link so that it was obviously from a third party site, I think I would have been less upset.

Now, I'm not naiive enough to think that this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time, but now it's happened to me, it's got me thinking. Firstly, have I ever done this before and did the people I do it to get as upset. I don't think there are any issues like this with my current site. Secondly, how can I stop things like this from happening. I did think of putting a link obfuscation mechanism in using PHP so that people could link to the album or even individual pages in it but not the actual JPEGs. Unfortunately, I use iPhoto to generate the albums so that would be a big hassle. The only other idea I had was to stamp every photograph with a copyright notice.
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