excellent photo Todd! I’ve been doing my watermark the same way–under the photo. But I didn’t think of creating an action in photoshop to do it. I just use layers, and drag it over. I’ll have to try out the actions. I’m not very familiar with them.

Sari, if there was a Like button I would give you the thumbs up!

Kim,
I appreciate your attempt to educate, what I am responding to was your use of fear to motivate. Leading off with the “are you afraid” question didn’t indicate to me you were looking to inform, instead it indicated to me you were looking to persuade and scare people into watermarking.
Some people view the universe as a scary place where they need to take precautions to protect themselves from the badness and some people view it as a friendly place where good comes their way and openness and sharing are how they choose to live.
I see your article as presenting the first point of view and I am looking to present the other side of the coin.
There are no “facts” to prove either way is correct because those statistics would be impossible to gather. We can kind of count how many people have had an image lose an attribution (take a poll) but it is nearly impossible to quantify the lost opportunities that might be associated with this. It’s also essentially impossible to calculate the probability of this happening as counting the number of images on the internet is nearly impossible.
I asked about the facts to point out that this isn’t a discussion about facts but instead a discussion about world views.
—lisa

Lisa, I was going to find you data to back up the risks of having your images online, but then I realized that is not what I was writing about. A simple Google search will more than likely provide you the information you seek.
I wrote the article to let artists know about snipping tools and how they strip out any metadata that has been embedded. So even though we think we are doing a good job by embedding our file info and naming out images we can never be 100% sure that our name is going to travel with the image.
As mentioned in the article, most people are good and just don’t know about attribution. My intent here was to help artists and nice people understand how snipping works and maybe a few more people will provide credits the next time they snip or post someone else’s image online. The bad guys will always find a work around.
Other than not having my work on line at all, I know there is nothing I can do to prevent images of my work from being stolen and maybe even reproduced in China.
Everything thing on the internet is vulnerable to theft; it’s the nature of the beast. I submit that the advantages and exposure for artists being online far out weighs the disadvantages.
Watermarking is a personal choice and can be done in such a way as not to interfere with the work itself. If I can provide the “good people” a trail back to me, then I choose to do so, you don’t have too.