I take hundreds of photographs every day, and I’ve published thousands of them here on Swedish Love Affair since I started blogging. People ask me now and then whether they can use my material to illustrate a page on their website, and usually I don’t have a problem with that as long as they put an active link to my blog.
Quite often I stumble upon my own photos on sites that haven’t asked my permission. This has happened more and more frequently as Swedish Love Affair has grown more popular.
If you have a website and want to find out if anyone is using your photos, there’s an easy way. Google has developed a special search engine designed for finding photos, called Google Images. Here’s how you use it:
Copy the link address to the photo you want to search for by right-clicking on the image and choose “Copy Image URL”.
Now head to http://images.google.com/ and click the little camera icon on the right side of the search field.
Paste your link in the new field by right clicking and choosing “paste” or pressing cmd+v/ctrl+v on your keyboard.
Press search and voilà, Google finds any identical and/or similar photos available for you!
It’s a neat function. I was shocked to see how many people have put my material on their sites without my permission.
If you would like to use any photo from Swedish Love Affair on your website, please send me an e-mail about it and ask. I’m sure it will be alright, but I want to keep track of what way my work is being used in.
Thank you!
Antonia
Hey, thank you very much for this info!
I’m happy to help:)
Hello! I knew about this function on google! I have put up a lot of your photographs on tumblr.com, but I have credited you every time
I’m sure you did, Polina! As I said, I’m fine with it as long as I know about it and there’s an active link back to Swedish Love Affair.
Oh wow! I’m a new blogger so I am very glad you posted this!
Thank you so much for this information. I had no idea you could do this.
This is one of the reason I HATE putting photos of myself out there. It would totally freak me out to see ‘my face’ on some random website.
I am sorry that people ‘borrow’ your photos like that.
Fascinating! I wondered how people found out that their photos had been used. How useful.
Great info! Thanks
Have you done anything about people stealing your photos? Contacted them?
OMG! That is so frustrating that people use materials on the net ilegally.
I’m hoping though that images on facebook are not that easy to steal and reuse on other sites. That’s the only site i’ve been posting my pictures on and perhaps livejournal too, but I’m hoping it will turn out alright…I have restricted their visibility only to friends…
That’s a really cool tool! Another way you can do it is have your page open in one tab and google images opened in another you just click and drag your picture to the search engine and it does the same ^^
I don’t know if it’s more practical or not but still it could be useful
Thank you! I think it might be useful too:) Also, you can upload your photos from the computer!
I didn’t know this – thanks so much for this info!