To say that I'm paranoid about theft of intellectual property is an understatement. If you've noticed, most of the photos posted on my Facebook page have a watermark on them. Putting the watermark is a bit of a pain in the ass, to be perfectly honest. I use Zenfolio for my photography site (they are AWESOME, by the way), and one of the great things that they do is let you watermark your photos. There's also an iPhone and iPad app where you can manage your photos, and upload and download photos from your iOS device. Very awesome.

So back to the watermark. To put the watermark on, I must upload my photos to Zenfolio via my iPhone, and then download back to my iPhone from Zenfolio. If the target album is set up such that all photos are watermarked, saving the photo back to the iPhone saves it WITH the watermark. I then upload the watermarked photo onto my Facebook page via the Pages app. Very long and invovled process.

But then I did two dumb things. First off, I use Instagram a fair bit. I had gotten in the habit of posting my photos to Instagram, and then doing the Zenfolio watermark trick before uploading them to Facebook. So while the FB version of the photos were watermarked, the Instagram versions were not. Dumb thing number two was setting up Instagram to post directly to my FB page. It's a very nice feature, but it meant that I bypassed the Zenfolio watermark thing.

At first I thought that was fine. I don't know why I convinced myself of that. It really makes no sense. And then I started noticing that some people posted pictures on Instagram with watermarks. So I started wondering if there was a way to watermark pics right off of Instagram itself. I did a bit of Googling here and there, and found out that many photographers were applying the watermark before uploading to Instagram, using one of the various iOS watermarking apps out there.

So then I started researching watermark apps. Which one's the best? Which one's the most popular. I even bought a few. And you know what? They're sitting on my phone, being unused. Why? Because I realized that no matter what, I'd have to watermark the pics before uploading to Instagram, and I was already pretty much doing that using Zenfolio, so why the heck would I want to use something else? Too bad I spent the money before coming to this conclusion.

I also realized something else. I think that most people watermark the original photo before uploading to Instagram. Which probably works okay for most of the tim, except when you crop your photo, in which case you might lose part or all of your watermark. So I devised a plan:

1. Take picture with iPhone camera
2. Turn off WiFi and Cellular Data
3. Apply filter on Instagram (photo will fail to upload, but a copy of the filtered photo will be saved to the camera roll)
4. Turn on WiFi and Cellular Data
5. Upload photo(s) to Zenfolio
6. Download photo(s) from Zenfolio
7. Upload photo(s) to Instagram

I have to admit that this workflow is less than optimal, and that if someone knows of a better way, please, let me know. Regardless, the pain of the process is worthwhile, because it protects my intellectual property. I've taken some pretty good Instagram photos, and I don't want some stranger just snagging the image and using it without permission, or worse, taking credit for my work.

Which leads me to my other point. Remember how I said that I didn't watermark my Instagram images initially? Well, I've started the extremely painful process of removing my existing images from there, and replacing them with the watermarked versions. Unfortunately, the fine folks at Instagram haven't provided us with a way to bulk delete photos, so this process is crazy slow. Plus I had to delete the non-watermarked Instagram photos from my FB page too. It was a little less painful, but equally annoying. At least I could do it on my computer, and wasn't restricted to doing it on my phone.

So, the moral of the story after this big long rant is: PROTECT YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY! Otherwise you'll be eating up your evenings deleting and re-posting Instagram photos.