360Photography

With advanced technologies such as Google’s AI capable of removing watermarks from images, and intelligent upscaling technologies like EnhanceNet, including visible watermarks on your images and uploading them at low resolution are no longer necessarily sufficient safeguards against your valuable images being stolen.

Invisible watermarking could be an efficient answer to these high-tech pirating methods. Imatag is a new service that adds an invisible and indelible watermark to your images, all without any degrading effect on image quality. This allows agencies and photographers to track their work and prove ownership when images are found to be illegally used on the web or in print.

On the Imatag website an online demo allows you to upload your own image, inspect the visual quality of the watermarked image and assess the robustness of the watermark. You can crop, scale and compress the original image to see see at what point the Imatag algorithm loses its ability to detect the watermark.

Another way of testing the system is by registering for a free account which allows you to upload 1GB worth of images. Uploaded images will be watermarked and hosted on the website but not be publicly available unless you make them visible. You can then download a watermarked image, edit it in your preferred image editing software and re-upload the modified image to check if the watermark can still be detected.

During a brief test with a couple of images we found that the modifications required to make the watermark undetectable were so strong that they would severely limit the usability of the resulting image. If you think Imatag could be a useful tool for your photography business but 1GB of storage is not sufficient for your purposes, 10 Euros per months subscription fee buy you 100GB. Special packages for agencies are available as well. More information is available on the Imatag website.