Tackling Food Photography Theft: The Kitchen Karma Way....

Over the last few months I have been facing a peculiar problem.

Some of my friends have reported that they have seen some of their friends on a popular social networking site using Kitchen Karma's food photographs. Now when I go to check these out, I cannot, because of privacy settings of these people.

Not once. Three different friends have reported this at various times.

Of course any food blogger would like the free publicity. But no, those who share apparently remove the watermark and then share. They do not make any claims that they have taken the photograph, but then neither do they give due credit.

Of course I am not alone. Most of my blogger friends have to deal with food photography thefts. Unfortunately not only fellow bloggers steal from them, so does the general public. The assumption is if a photograph is out there in the cyber world, it is perfectly legal to erase the copyright and use it as your own.

I will not go into the morality of this. There is no point.

But of course, neither do I want people to use my photographs/ ideas/work without giving me due credit.

I am not the world's greatest photographer, but I work really hard to make this blog look attractive and I certainly do not want people to steal my ideas/work.

Husband and me, we started discussing this. We read up various proffered solutions. None of them seemed feasible or practical. Hence we started brainstorming. Soon we found an ingenious solution.

The solution, when we stumbled upon it, was so easy and straightforward that it kind of took out breath away with it's simplicity. No wonder they say that the best things in life need not be the most complicated.

Okay, without further testing your patience, let me share the solution. The solution is that these thieves can easily remove the watermark using various photo editing software. But what if we put in the watermark in the original layout in such a way that try cropping it and you spoil the photograph?

Once the idea emerged I started using  it in my various photo layouts. And you know what I have started enjoying painting these cute name badges.

Like this badge I made for my cold coffee recipe.

I have been using this idea since August 2012. The first time I used this was in my lemon curd post. Of course my style has changed over the months. And of course I have not been able to do this to every food I photograph. I just do not have enough patience.

I did not realize that I would enjoy making these tags so much. I create one appropriate for my post and then simply place it strategically next to the food I am photographing. Any bit of paper including dress tags, discarded greetings cards, bookmarks, discarded theater/movie tickets, odd pieces of paper does the trick. All you then need are some colours or coloured pens.

So what do you think of the solution? 

It is working for me, now even if people do not give me credit, the name Kitchen Karma is hard to remove from my photographs.

It is also helping in creating the Kitchen Karma brand.

I have been meaning to write about this solution for ages, but me being me, the regaining queen of procrastination I kept delaying it. Then I saw one popular blogger using my solution, of course without credit, that is when I realized that it is time I floated the idea! Please feel free to use it, but credit would be appreciated.

The cyber world is not a safe place. But there are some nice people out there.