Protect your pictures

If you have read the Facebook post you will be aware of the risk you are at due to the government basically sanctioning theft. It is impossible to completely protect your pictures but hopefully these ideas will help a little.
The best way of protecting your pictures is to add copyright and contact information to the Metadata (information stored on every image file). There are many ways of doing this but i will use a free program to do it.
The programme is called Faststone Image Viewer and can be found by typing this into your search engine. This programme can be downloaded and used for free (a donation can be given).
To add the information to the Metadata first highlight your image then select the view menu and click on file properties go to the details tab and click, the second section down is called origin , You will see that authors name is usually blank if you click on the word author it opens a box into which you can type your name. Once done click on the copyright box and you can add your copyright info. (the copyright logo © can be found by pressing Alt while holding down press 0169 on the number keyboard) You need to add a way you can be contacted or whoever can still assume ownership. If you do not have a website it may be worth creating an email just or this purpose eg: ©johnsmith@whatever.co.uk2013 always add the year. Once you have done this click apply at the bottom and your information will be added to the metadata.
This is not a perfect protection as it can be removed by unscrupulous people but it helps.

The other form of protection is the watermark which goes across the image. I will write another post on this process soon.

This is a relatively slow way to do this if you are adding a number of images but it is free, A quick search of the internet should come up with much faster ways of adding this information. How you do it is not important but doing it is. If the government has no desire to protect your images you need to do so.

Doing this in no way guarantees the safety of your images im afraid

All information here is based on a PC im sorry but i dont know about Macs but it will be possible.