I’ve been aware for a while now that, especially on Etsy, some gemstone sellers have been taking my images and even my descriptions and using them for their own products. Over the past few weeks, I have been contacted numerous times by customers and other reputable Etsy sellers experiencing the same problem to let me know and the problem seems to be escalating sharply. Obviously it’s annoying for me but I think it’s really bad for customers who buy on the basis of photographs and they are actually buying something different. It’s deception. Because of this, I am going to be watermarking all of my photographs from now on. Whilst I realise that this is not going to completely solve the problem, it feels like an important first step. I will try hard to ensure that the watermark is faint and is placed so that it does not obscure the body of the photograph, see below:
It’s going to take a while, but I will be replacing all photographs over the next few months with watermarked versions….
Joopy Gems | The Blog 