Photography Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional, enthusiast and amateur photographers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
After I got interested in photography over the period of lockdown, I have decided to print my photographs. What things should I keep in mind before going?
Also, what measures should I take so that my photographs are not stolen by the printing-person?
PS :- I am going to print it at the local photography shop.
This question is slightly different from this one, I want to mainly ask about avoiding my photos from being stolen.
To absolutely prevent a print shop from stealing your photos, buy or rent a printer and print the photographs yourself.
This will also require buying appropriate paper. And perhaps color calibration for the paper and printer, although using the printer manufacturer’s branded paper often gives pretty good results without calibration.
A shop with a good reputation, that wishes to keep that reputation (and therefore its customers), will be motivated to behave honestly.
If the trust is broken for some reason, then we have courts to restitute the victim, and possibly impose punitive damages. A court case is very bad for a business's credibility.
First off, I suspect that you are being influenced by Dunning-Kruger fallacy to even think about such a scenario of your photos being stolen. I am sorry to crush your expectations, but let's get back down to Earth and be realistic: if you think that around 1.5 years one could get from a complete beginner to someone so good that their photos are "worth" being stolen like that, then you are vastly underestimating all the time and effort needed to get successful in this domain. I don't deny that your photos could be, indeed, beautiful, but it is a delusional naïveté to assume that they are so sophisticated and original that all the print shops are potential thieves, teetering on the brink on committing a copyright infringement crime as soon as they get hold of your photos. Believe me, these shops regularly see millions of sophisticated and original photos. What reason do you have to think that yours are special?
And to answer the question about how to prevent your photos from being stolen by the print shop: don't be a world class photographer, and you won't have any reason to worry about it.
Even a small photo lab processes thousands of photos from different people daily. Aside from a quick quality check, they don't even look at a majority of the photos.
All sorts of photos pass by them, and they typically have little interest in stealing customers' photos. Many photos are even thrown away because customers don't bother to pick them up, far past what's reasonable for the lab to hold onto them.
If you are concerned about the people at a particular lab, use a different one.
Another option - don't print them at all.
Instead, keep them entirely digital, using a monitor to view or display the photos. There used to be "digital photo frames" which would cycle though a set of images which may fill the purpose.
You could embed a digital watermark. That way, if the images get stolen and used on the internet, you could prove their provenance. I've never done it myself, so I don't speak from experience. Since you own the copyright on your images, you could then sue the shop. You could even tell the print shop such a watermark is present to persuade them to not steal your images. I can't imagine them doing so in any case.
It's like with code, scientific papers or with anything precious. Either it's so bad or common it's not worth stealing or it'll be stolen - eventually.
Physical security won't help because of always having a larger force (up to war weapons) to break the defence. Psychological security, e.g. by keeping it in your head or obscuring it (secret/password/...) won't help due to social engineering and us not being machines. Digital security? If it's shiny enough, it'll be pirated/cracked the next possible day once more than the creator has an access to it and if it's running.
Examples:
Don't try to prevent it because you never will once the thing is shared with more than one person. Instead, build your own "brand", your reputation, and eventually it'll be others recognizing your work even if somebody else steals it.
And also, some creators virtually mine on the stealing due to it increasing the popularity between people who wouldn't even consider buying, so for the next thing you come with they might be either more willing to buy or at least spread the word which might eventually get you the money, popularity or other things you might seek.
How do I prevent my photos being stolen by the print shop?
You need to physically stand behind the person and breathe down their neck the entire time they are processing your order and make some outlandish requests like "prove to me that your computer isn't secretly copying the files in the background".
This way you are 100% guaranteed that a print shop will not be able steal anything because they will refuse to do business with you outright.
Now, I humbly ask you not to steal my advice because I have plans to use it and become a millionaire.
There are legal principals involved. To make a claim of copyright requires that the work be known.
So put digital versions of the photos on a webpage and put a copyright notice on the webpage. Then the dated files make the actual historical claim for each photo.
Or for photos of very particular interest, copyright the photos with the copyright office.
Well essentially, it doesn't matter if the work is stolen, it only matters that royalties be paid if the stolen work should become popular and successful. Also, correct authorship, or artist, must be noted. Along these lines, the thief becomes the agent !
Furthermore, a digital photo could be a cryptographic NFT. And why are most NFT's only cartoons ?
