Flickr groups using your photos

[Greg McCary]

Well I hope Viewfinder is the right place for this. Move it John if you need to but........
I have noticed lately that some Flickr groups are using images posted in there group for advertising on FaceBook, for example. If someone posts a picture in a Jekyll Island group I have seen the picture show up later on Facebook in an ad to come and vacation at Jekyll Island. The picture on FaceBook indicates it's from a Flickr post.
So is this a new thing? I know Flickr was bought out recently and made some major changes.
Also I don't care if someone in my area wants to use my images for the better of the community for advertising tourism, as long as they ask and I know about it. I mean it's a win win situation. They get tourist and I get exposure. I know that as an artist I would starve to death and that if I start charging a lot of money for my pictures it will take the fun out of what I do.
But with all this I doubt many know that some Flicker groups are using their images for advertising purposes.
So is me getting exposure on Flickr worth getting my pictures getting clipped and reused without my knowledge? Should we delete or accounts on Flickr? It's to crowded to get noticed much anyway.
Here is one of the FaceBook sites that are doing it.
https://www.facebook.com/GoldenIslesGeorgia?fref=ts
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldenislesgeorgia
http://www.goldenisles.com/

[Franglais]

Anything you make publicly available on Internet is gone. People probably don't even know who the original author is. If you want to limit the diffusion of the image then put a watermark on it or else make it too small to be of much use to anyone. I rarely go beyond 600x600 pixels anyway.

[Photo-John]

That sounds like blatant theft to me. You'd have to check the Flickr terms of use to be sure, though. Is this something you've seen discussed elsewhere? Do you have more information? My guess is, whoever is doing the advertising for Golden Isles just pinched your photo. The first thing I'd do is go to them and find out who's in charge of the advertising. I would not assume that this is ok or let it go.

[mattb]

I agree with John. It sounds fishy to me. Have they used your photos? I'm guessing they are either stealing them or they have some kind of agreement with the photographer. I watermark my photos for some exposure if people do want to share them on blogs, FB, or whatever.
I have only found one case so far of someone going to the effort of blurring out my watermark and using the photo.
Looks like it's still up at this Chinese site.

[Greg McCary]

They haven't used my photos. It's been awhile since I have been to the beach but I have seen pictures on Flickr and then I will see the same picture posted on Facebook featuring a travel ad.
I do have some posted on Facebook, not from Flickr though. I have always been asked and one Facebook group made me an Admin so I would have control of my content.
Yes Charles I watermark almost everything and also resize for the web. I honestly think Flickr has become a haven for picture thiefs.

[Franglais]

I was looking at Flickr but I don't think I'll bother now. Time for a quick review of my usage:

- I had a couple of collections of village events on Skydrive with a private read-only link to the collections that was included in the village web site. That worked fine till a couple of months ago when I upgraded to Outlook.com. My links stopped working - fortuntely - because the access became read-write. Ouch
- I quickly switched the collections to PICASA then realised that they were actually on Google+ and that people with the private link could see my Google+ friends and all my personal information
- I have 100GB of online storage with my Internet Supplier Orange but that only allows me to share over Facebook. However being French they have none of this "nudes are prohibited" nonsense so it's still useful
- Finally for my village photos I went back to Outlook.com with a new private link, carefully constructed which seems to work

I have a few photos on Facebook but access is only for my Facebook Friends. I keep a close eye on the Facebook governance rules and it seems like Facebook can't use them for anything else.