One of the dangers of putting your work online is that eventually, someone, somewhere is going to use your work for their own purposes. I’ve been lucky. I’ve actually collected payment from a publisher for using one of my images on the cover of their book. I’ve also had to tell commercial travel blogs to remove my images from their websites.

It’s hard to decide where to draw the line. What is acceptable use of my work? If there is money involved, I want some. That means if you send a copy of the image file to a professional printer, he’s getting paid, and so should I. If you print it on your own printer, I really don’t mind. If you want to use it in your “free guide to the parks”, you have sponsorship, and I want to be paid. If you want to print it out for educational purposes, fine, with one exception: don’t try to use my images to teach “intelligent design”, or creationism.

But how on earth am I supposed to troll the entire interwebs looking for unauthorized use of my images? There are only so many hours in a day, and I’d rather be taking new pictures than looking for ones I’ve already taken.

Which leads me to the point of this post: There’s a new, free service available to photographers. ImageRights will do the tedious trolling of the internet for you, and present you with a weekly report of up to 10,000 images for free. Further, they will go after copyright infringers and split the compensation amount with you for 50/50.

I’ve signed up. I’ll be reporting on what they find. I am not affiliated with them in any other way.