We commonly share many of our personal images on different online platforms which remains there until and unless deleted by us and sometimes it remains there even after deleted.
You might be unaware of many websites that are currently using your photos without your consent. You might find your pictures to be used commercially by many websites and sometimes people give credit to the author but this is not the way things work. The Internet is so big that it is impossible to keep track of your photos.
The most popular image sharing site like Instagram puts some level of privacy by not allowing to download any photos but Facebook on the other hand freely allows it. Though all social sharing sites claim the privacy of your photos none really cares about you because they are running a business not any charity home.
Usually, you would never discover this infringement, but there is a tool that has given us photographers a huge advantage. Actually this tool has always been there below our nose but unfortunately, we couldn’t find it.
How to Find your images on the Internet
Google has come up with a very intelligent solution where instead of searching keywords you have to search for images. Google has crawling access to almost all the websites running commercially. This makes it very easy for google to search similar images and of coarse Google AI is used to search similar images so even if its tampered Google will find it for you.
It’s very simple all you have to do is to go to Google Images and upload the image you intend to search. As you go to the Google Images the similar search bar will appear where you have to click the camera icon and then upload an image. You can also paste the image URL if it is already available on some online website.
If your image or similar image surfacing on websites then the search result will look like this. Then you can individually visit each website and claim copyright infringement.
This is a very powerful tool so use it wisely doesn’t waste your time by searching every image you upload. Instead, try to watermark or upload reduced image quality on online websites.
