Stealing blog pics!!! Really?! Thou shall not ....




I Blog because I like to share some of the awesome places and awesome things there are to do out in the world with others.  I can only hope that some folks might find some of the information helpful or informative or even inspire them to see some place that they didn't even know existed before.  At the least, I hope to garner a smile or an inspiration to get out & see something from one of my stories.   All material on this blog, both stories and pictures, are owned by me.  I have posted the copyright information in the footer for the Blog and on the picture album that contains the pictures for the blog.

I get emails on occasion from people wanting to use a picture or two or a story for a specific purpose.  I am always happy to work with them provided they cite proper credit and/or give me a link.  I appreciate  the fact that people want to reuse my material with my permission.

I DO NOT appreciate it when people copy my text or download my pictures without permission to do so!   A few days ago, I happened upon a Analytics program that wanted to trial on my blog before using on a commercial site.   This program captures download events.  To my surprise, I found people both near and far downloading pictures from my blog posts without permission.   I found one person had downloaded 16 pictures, on one it was every picture in the post (hmmm...  I am guessing they probably grabbed the text too!) and they did this in just a 2 day period!

I have read lots of blog posts & been on lots of websites and have never thought of downloading someone's pictures.   Maybe I am naive, maybe I just like to take my own pics.  I have used pics from Picture sites that offer free or paid pictures for people to use as they wish but going on a personal blog & downloading their pics!?  C'mon!   My first reaction was to just take down the blog & stop blogging all together.  Though I guess it could be seen as a form of flattery that someone wants your pictures, I found it to feel violating.   So I went through and added blatant copyright to most of my pictures.  Some even have 2 on them because despite there being a physical copyright discretely on several of the pictures, some of them were downloaded too.  So from here on out, I will mar the pics with copyrights in places that will at least make it a little harder for someone to steal.  I know people will still steal and do what they are gonna do but at least they will have to work a little harder at it.  My blog posts won't be as pretty as I would like anymore, but hopefully people will still enjoy the pics.  Its a shame that Blogger doesn't offer download protection.  It's a shame that we need download protection...

If you are interested in using one of my pictures or my content please contact me.