I Was Fine With People Sharing My Photos Online. Then I Found Out Companies Were Stealing Them.

A friend messaged me one afternoon to say he'd spotted one of my photos on Reddit. Someone had posted it in a photography subreddit - no credit, just sharing it because they liked it.

Honestly? I wasn't that bothered. That's the internet. People share things they love, and if someone thought my work was worth sharing, I'll take it. But the message planted a seed: who else has posted my stuff?

So I ran a reverse image search.

I was expecting to find a few more Reddit posts, maybe a Pinterest board, possibly a Tumblr from 2014. What I actually found was a handful of commercial websites using my image - a local business, a media site - without a license, without permission, without so much as a credit line. Just my photo, deployed on their site like it was a free stock image they'd pulled from somewhere.

I sat with that feeling for a minute. You probably know the one. It's not quite rage, not quite disbelief - it's something in between. Like finding out someone has been quietly helping themselves to something that took you real skill and time to create, and they never thought twice about it.

Here's the thing they don't tell you when you first start posting your work online: your photos are your intellectual property the moment you take them. You don't have to register them. You don't have to put a watermark on them. The copyright is yours automatically. And when a business uses your image commercially without a license, they owe you money - retroactively.

I didn't know exactly what to do next. I knew I could do something, but the process felt murky. Do I email them? Do I lawyer up immediately? How do I even calculate what they owe me?

I fumbled through it. Sent some emails. Got some responses, got some ignored. Eventually recovered some payment - not a fortune, but enough to make clear that this was worth pursuing.

And then I thought: there has to be a better way to manage this.

That frustration is why I built Imalume. Not to be litigious, not to shake down bloggers who meant no harm - but to give myself a structured, calm way to handle something that is genuinely their legal right to pursue. Track the case, document the evidence, send a professional demand letter, recover what's fair. Then when I started to see a return, my wife "gently" suggested to me that there are probably other photographers going through the same struggles. So I slapped a coat of paint on it and here we are.

If you've run a reverse image search and felt that same mixture of validation and fury - this blog is for you. Over the next few posts, I'm going to walk you through everything I've learned: how to find your stolen images, what your rights actually are, how to approach infringers, and what to realistically expect.

You made that photo. You deserve to be paid for it.

Imalume is a free tool built by a photographer, for photographers, to track and recover payment for unauthorized commercial use of their images. Try it here.