Tag Archive: watermarking


Ok, an announcement. I guess I’m back.

I’ve decided to return here for good. Some changes might happen though but they aren’t exacly definitive. I haven’t also explored what is new in terms of security and plugins to find if there is still interesting to be added to the site, but the basic that will happen from now on is;
1. Images won’t be added to galleries, unless I change my mood. They will posted individually, sometimes with a short description of anything relevant (where I got its name inspiration, how many time it took to render, etc), sometimes just with the name of the image. it’s too boring to add each image again, add a description, etc etc. Let the galleries for my old images. They might also be trimmed down at some point, removing images I don’t care much about them anymore. As I’ve said, there was a period of my “fractal life” where I was somehow compelled so to speak (by stupid group of users) to make a huge number of images in a short period of time (come on, you must be creative they said), and it became a job. with NO rewards. And 99% of the images didn’t satisfy ME. A couple (a dozen or more, actually) images that have been made in a year or so an posted in my FB page (that might or not have appeared here in the past) will be posted here as well. Actually, the FB page is… http://www.facebook/mundofractal/ (I guess), I’m not sure if you will be able to reach it from here.
2. The images won’t have a bookmark anymore most of the time, unless I find the image is a real “masterpiece”. If thieves want to steal it, they will. It’s quite easy and fast to add a watermark, but it’s even faster to cover it. The images won’t be posted anywhere else by me, I am not part of any digital community, forum or FB group. If they are posted without my usual internet nicknames (Mr. Mandelbrot, marcusbacus, fractallland, etc. etc….), they were probably stolen. Fuck that.
3. I have a Facebook page about it now as well just for posting images and a very small comment (a name or of the image and a line or so), but both here and FB have a giant annoyances to make you post stuff when you have made a few more images you like. Here I have a little more room to post and not care much if it is being sen or not (it is…), and the FB annoying “BOOST THIS IMAGE FOR JUST $5 TO GET MORE 10000 VIEWS in every single fucking post is really annoying, hence I’m trying to go back here. No, I don’t want to boost these posts neither make Mark more rich. Fractals is my hobby, not my income. Or his.
4. I might add an email account again  (I lost my account where I registered my UF account so I can’t even get updates or re-registering my copy when I need an instalattion of my old registered – expensive! -copy of the updates since version 5 so I’m still using the v. 4something) just for dealing with any subject that might appear here – questions, comments that don’t fit in the comments page, and other random things. If it goes to a spam list, it’s gone.
5. I still am hating Apophysis. I am in a very very “old school” phase, so it will be more just very common spirals, midgets and some other popular images that will be the core of the next posts, I suppose. Eventually there will be a bit more abstract stuff like in the past, but I need inspiration.

6. It’s very sad to hear about Paul N. Lee’s passing and all his major fractal archive of softwares, tutorials, formulas being gone.

Related Images:

Is your work being stolen?

This post at plagiarismtoday.com discuss 5 methods that can prevent it. The post might seem a bit old (it’s from 2005) but these methods are, if not 100% effective, still the best.

I’ve tried some of these methods, but some are quite annoying to be used, your site ends up getting a bit crippled, slower and it might not even work. Javascript for example and their pop-up messages like “COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, DO NOT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION!!!” can scare some people off, but anyone a bit more clever knows how to bypass that and save the image anyway. The warnings in these messages are valid though.

I’ve learned from experience that the best isn’t to build big walls and stuff, but when and if some stealing episode ever happens, go trace whomever did that instead of punishing all your site’s visitors. It might be easier this way, sometimes a good traffic analyzer tool for your site can help a lot, even the free ones, mostly when it’s a case of bandwidth theft (hotlinking).

My method of choice now is just a plain simple watermark, placed carefully to not ruin the image’s aspect but also carefully placed in a region of the image where a cropping to get rid of it would get weird results. Again, it’s not 100% effective, there are people that have used even these watermarked images from places like gettyimages.com without even bothering about the big watermark right in the middle of the image so they might even use the image from here “as is” too. This is not 100% bad, as if the watermark is preserved, it’s kind of an advertisement (for free) as well.

Regarding photography: I think with the ability to read the EXIF data of a file it’s sometimes easy to track down people that just copy the image(s) without much thinking, but I’m not sure how easy it would be to edit that kind of data and pretend that it’s your image.

As it says as a conclusion in the article, these methods can’t fully prevent someone from stealing your work. But it can sort of make the “lazy thieves” go away, which is the biggest part of them all. If one really wants to steal your content for whatever reason, sometimes they can do wonders to achieve that…