How do Getty do it?

smash

How do they track their images?

A few years ago we had a designer working with us... we have an istock account but this little fcuker seemed to like taking images from getty and we've had a few letter from them now about use of images on various websites.

He used small crops of the original images, sometimes it's hard to even see if they're the same image. If I could get my hands on him, I'd kill him... but anyway, how do they trace them?

I'd love to do the same with my flickr stream, just to see.

Crispin

Pretty sure they just hired a firm called pic scout. Creates digital fingerprints with each image. http://www.picscout.com/

smash

Is it just embedded exif data or digital watermark then?

Crispin

Ok so here is the blurb from Pic scout site... (seems they actually don't use a digi-watermark per se)


"There are many ways to track images on the Internet. Some methods embed digital watermarks into the photo image by adding extra data to the image. Images can then be found by searching for the unique signature of the digital watermark. However, these watermarks can be altered or eliminated from the photo as the image is converted from one file type to another.

A more reliable method is image recognition. This method examines raw image data to identify image "fingerprints" – unique patterns that are part of the image itself. This is the technique PicScout uses. Because this method does not rely on embedded watermarks surviving many forms of digital alterations, image recognition can match even highly manipulated or altered images with their original sources. PicScout proprietary image fingerprinting technology allows PicScout to identify images wherever they appear on the Internet, even if the image has been altered, colorized, edited, cropped, rotated or embedded into another image."

Cameraman

There's also this :

http://www.tineye.com/about