Don’t Steal Images!

Got your attention, did I?

GOOD!

I want to talk to you about stealing images. And really, most of you don’t even know you’re stealing images. That’s okay, we really don’t know what we don’t know.

Have you gone to google images to grab images or photo’s for your own use? Or visited any old website or even facebook page or profile to find a photo? It doesn’t matter if it’s for personal use or business use, YOU CANNOT DO THAT. End of discussion. (Not really, but it could be.)

This is SUCH an important topic for anyone and ESPECIALLY for businesses using images. You really don’t want to get your ass sued, do you?

I will actually be doing a series of posts and video tutorials on this topic, but for now, we will start at the beginning.

Say you want to create an image for your upcoming yoga workshop. You don’t happen to have any images of a yoga pose of yourself or a friend handy, or just want something pretty and unique. Cool. We all want this, and we *should* use images on our marketing, websites, business cards, flyers, etc.




So what do you do? You go to google, type in “yoga pose”, hit enter, then click on the Images link. You scroll through to find one you like, click on it, and decide you will either right click on it to save it to your hard drive, or you click “view image” to see it larger, then right click to save it.

NO no no no no!

Click on the  title of the image OR click on the “visit page” button. What do you see?

It links to a magazine blog post about yoga for scoliosis. A real magazine. Who probably either professionally shot this image themselves or bought it from a stock photo site. {This IS a wild guess, of course, I don’t know for a fact, but having owned an online magazine for 8 years myself, I’m probably right.} You do not have permission to use this image.

There is a HUGE misconception that you can just use whatever images you see online, especially from google images. Google images is actually still the same search engine, just for images related to the term you’re looking for. It is NOT a repository of images that people put there for you to use. It is every single website indexed from the search term, and more often than not, those images are someone else’s hard work and COPYRIGHT. They are NOT FREE TO USE.

I personally have had my images stolen and used on other websites without my permission. Photo’s I have taken with my own camera or phone. Photo’s that I had my own watermarks (copyright) on. One photo in particular – of a specific product I sell, taken in my own office – I found on over 3 dozen websites, which I discovered by accident and spent a very long afternoon of searches and emails requesting it be removed. Not all of them complied, but most did. It felt like a complete invasion, literally like someone had walked into my house and taken a valued piece of art off my wall and walked out. It’s not fun.

So.

Now what? Where the heck do you find images that you can use?

Watch for another post soon on finding images. 🙂

But in the meantime, just use your OWN photo’s taken on your camera or phone.