I’m a big fan of Lenstag for multiple reasons. For one, it’s a fantastic way to keep track of your equipment. For another, it helps you find stolen equipment, find missing equipment and even helps sell equipment by transferring from one account another.
At one point Lenstag launched mobile apps to monitor your gear. Then came something that was even more brilliant. Because Lenstag has a huge database of gear and serial numbers, they launched a monitoring tool. This tool is a free extension for Google Chrome. It monitors your Internet browsing and others also using the extension. As people browse the web, the extension is looking at the metadata of every image it comes across. It then searches the Lenstag database and notifies the photographer if a photograph is found with the camera’s serial number.
Of course, this tool improves with every new user, so please install it and let it help you find your photographs used without permission.
The screenshot below is the email I received from Lenstag showing a bunch of domains using my photographs. Some are mine, some are test sites for work, some are guest blog articles I’ve done and of course, some are content scrapers. The ones that worry me are content scrapers.
The next screenshot is the user interface you see when logged into Lenstag. It allows you to see each URL that includes an image of yours. As you can see, I pinpointed which domains/URLs are the content scrapers.
When you click on a domain, the expanded view shows some info on the photograph in addition to the URL of the photograph in use and the URL of the page in question.
From here you can take the information provided from Lenstag and either let it be or take action, like using a DMCA letter. Of course everyone has their own idea of which is good and bad. My concerns are with photographs used without permission, so I take action against content scrapers.
I hope you find this helpful and head over to Lenstag to get your account setup.
Thanks for reading and happy shooting,
Scott
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