© Nmedia

Happy hump day, folks!

Today, I have a quick and easy tip on checking the use of our images on any other websites than our own. By quick and easy, well, the checking part is easy. Having to go through all of the images that you want to check? That’s going to be the tedious bit.

But fret not! You don’t have to check every image of every post if you don’t want to. I certainly don’t because really, who has the time? What I like to do is do a random check of images in

1. My more popular posts, and
2. My latest posts for up to a week.

Using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to find out what your most popular posts are. Use those posts to check if the images used in them were used elsewhere. As for the #2, I like to check images used in my newest posts for up to a week. This one is particularly important because this allows me to find out if anyone has been cheekily pulling my blog updates into their own websites to use as their own. I’ve been dealing with a couple of websites that have stolen my latest content recently and they have been pulling my content to use as their own each time my blog is updated with a new post. Google Alerts doesn’t always work 100% of the time in alerting me if my content has been used elsewhere so I tend to check the fraudulent use of my images instead.

After rambling on for many paragraphs, let’s get on to that quick and easy tip, eh? All you need is Google Image Search.

I have a folder of all of the images I’ve used in my blog posts since 2007. For random checks on newer images, I drag and drop those images from my folder to Google Image Search to see if it’s available on other websites other than my own. By right, you should only see those images linked to your website. You may also see them on Pinterest when users pin your content. Fair enough, it’s what we want anyway to drive traffic to our websites.

What you wouldn’t want to see are your images linked to websites other than your own, Pinterest or similar social media platforms. When your images are on other websites and you didn’t give the owners express permission prior to them publishing them, then those images were stolen. It doesn’t matter if the images’ watermarks were cropped (this is a huge NO NO. Please don’t do this!); the metadata will still reflect your original photo.

What if your images were used in a collage? Will Google Image Search still work? Yes it will! It may not be very accurate though but 8/10 collaged images I’ve checked gave me accurate results on Google.

If you’re using the Firefox browser, you can download the add-on called Google Reverse Image Search for the browser. It’s a simple tool that allows you to search the images reversely on Google Images. You’ll not only be able to find if your images are used on other sites, you’ll also be able to find other copies of the images you’re looking for. This tool isn’t just useful for checking for fraudulent use of your images, you can also do a reverse search on other images to see where the original image came from. This is particularly useful for crediting images you found on Pinterest because just saying “via Pinterest” as a credit is not enough. Please give credit where credit is due.

I’m sure there are other ways of checking for fraudulent use of our images and content but for now, this works very well for me along with the use of Google Alerts and Mention. It’s also a good way of checking where a particular image came from, even if it isn’t our own for quick and accurate crediting.

If you have other methods of checking for dodgy use of your images, do let us know in the comments!