girl geek adjacent

This is a Grumpy Alikat

Last Tuesday evening on my drive home, I saw a large plume of black smoke on the horizon and lots of fire trucks heading in the general direction of Mt. Wellington. As it happens, Corporate Consumables was engulfed in fire.  Being a geek and having a loose association with the emergency services, I snapped a pic of this smoke plume and twitpic’d it hoping that my firemen friends could give me the skinny on what was happening. I was hoping like hell it wasn’t a friends business premises which was in the same vicinity.

In the next 20 minutes it took me to drive home, it got retweeted a couple of times here and here among others. But you could imagine my horror on getting home, I checked out the NZ Herald website, and my photo was already on there with someone elses name taking credit for the photograph.

I saw red. I saw more than red. I had that red mist that racing drivers talk about. I immediately emailed the NZ Herald telling them that it was my photo and they should be crediting me, not the person who emailed it in. To their credit, they quickly fixed it up and apologized. Nice considering it wasn’t their fault.

The small print in twitpic’s privacy policy states that once it’s on their site, its public. I tracked down the person who uploaded my image, without my permission to the NZ Herald site and he just shrugged me off with the following tweet:

The world of in demand news is a tough game. I crossed the finish line before you

When you submit an image to NZ Herald, you have to check a box confirming the following:

Please tick this box to confirm that the media you are sending us belongs to you, was legally created, is available for use by nzherald.co.nz and other APN publications free of charge now and in the future, and has not been altered in any way that would mislead the public.

It didn’t belong to him to submit in the first place. The photograph, taken rather illegally as I was driving at the time, belonged to me. I may have not wanted this photo published on the NZ Herald website given that I was driving a motor vehicle at the time I took this photo. But now its well and truely in the public domain. But its fraud on his part. He purported to NZ Herald that he was the legal owner and this image was legally created.

I hate to break it to ya sunshine, but you’re not the legal owner and it sure as shit wasn’t legally created.

But theres lessons to take away from this, some of which have been learned the hard way.

I wouldn’t have gotten so angry if they’d asked and appropriate credit was given.

The internet is not anonymous. I was able to track this person down on twitter and have an “exchange” with them. They then changed their user name, but not their real name or location, so I was able to track them down again. Try harder to hide yourself next time. Protecting your tweets just isn’t enough.

Your twitter account is a brand. At the peak of my rant, I was warned that I was damaging my “brand”. Point taken. Thanks Wendy.

From now on, before twitpic’ing something that might go around the world a few times, watermark it.

Watermarking on the iPhone

So from this, and the old adage “theres an app for that” I set about finding an iPhone app to watermark my photos with copyright information before submitting them to twitpic or similar sites. I found one called PhotoMarkr. You put in text you want as a copyright notice and you can move this around, resize it, adjust opacity and even add a large (c) to make your point perfectly clear. Here’s my original photograph, as it appeared in the NZ Herald and the new version, as edited in PhotoMarkr. Not bad for a wee app that cost NZD$4.19

Before PhotoMarkr

After PhotoMarkr

The basics of using this app is you can either use your camera from inside the app or you can load an image from your phone. With one touch of a button, you can add your preset watermark, or adjust to suit. Use your fingers to move, rotate, resize and adjust transparency and then save your image when done. You can tape each object and move them independently of each other, sadly adjusting the transparency adjusts both objects, but that is the only flaw I have found with this app. Here is a couple of screenshots from the app below.

PhotoMarkr Screenshot #1

PhotoMarkr Screenshot #2

Shame there are a few people on the internet who spoil it for the rest really.