Watermarking not own images

[David]

I’ve heard suggestions putting watermarks on images when posting to stumbleupon, tumblr, pinterest, etc. That looks obvious. But what if let’s say I do round-up posts, listicles and so on and take images from many sources. Can I watermark these just like this? I still think about including text to original source, so watermark doesn’t make sense.

What’s the best way to overcome this? Editing, making collages? Or find my own photographer… Thanks, guys.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I do this all of the time, but only if I alter the image enough that I can justify it. As a matter of fact, I just got done watermarking an image I didn't create about 30 minutes ago. The difference was, I layered text over it and other graphics so that the image mainly served as the background to my "true image." I'm going to slap this all over social sites too. I honestly don't care. I've never been asked to take something down or undo it. If I'm asked to provide a link, I will. I'd rather be moving forward and getting work done than worrying about it. I'll deal with the one-in-a-million scenario when it happens.

 

[animalstyle]

Same boat as Ryu here. Made gifs from videos and slapped watermarks on em. I personally just try not to be blatant about it, for example amazon product image (the one everyone will be using on their site) with a watermark and no other changes.

 

[Tucky]

Just be extra careful if you are thinking of doing this with stock imagery as opposed to just funny pictures from the web. People like Getty have clever spiders that can detect their images and they will ask for a shit load of money.

 

[David]

Alright, thank you guys. All in all I feel that I have to care more about earning the income first, and care about the rest afterwards. I'm trying to change my view on this entire thing. Money is most important, so main focus has to be there. Even it's clear, but subconsciously I find myself in the same "security" trap. It's kind of difficult to overcome this because of my 9-5 background in some specific area.

Someone has a good signature here about stopping playing in the sandbox… or something like this. That's very true