If you are a professional photographer, or a photo enthusiast, you probably also realize that rampant online copyright infringement costs creative professionals a significant amount of lost revenue – every image that is published without a valid license is a lost sale for someone.

Signili Review – Invisible Watermark Software

Signili offers two different services. The first is their invisible digital watermark software app. The second is a search function that tracks where your Signili watermarked images have been published online.

Signili offers a 14 day free trial of their lowest paid package which allows you to watermark up to 50 images per month which are then tracked for up to six months.

There is also a completely free package that would allow you to watermark up to 20 images per month.

Prices then increase from 9,99 € for 50 watermarked images per month to 74,99 € for 500 watermarked images per month. Unless you are a large production studio, 250 or 500 images per month seems like a reasonable cap for most photographers.

 

Signili Invisible Watermark Image Export

Once you have an account registered, there are three ways that you can use the Signili software to add an invisible watermark to your photos. You can use their web application, a desktop app – or by far the best option for production photographers – the Signili Lightroom Plugin.

Using the Signili Lightroom plugin your image exports will automatically be watermarked by Signili’s invisible digital watermark software, saved to your local hard drive (in the location you specify) and uploaded directly to Signili’s cloud server for tracking.

 

The export process does take a little longer than a standard Lightroom export and you need an internet connection.

 

Image Quality and File Size

Signili promises that the watermark is invisible and does not significantly increase the file size. Looking at the images I have watermarked, I can’t tell the difference.

Signili also promises that the invisible watermark can survive resizing, resaving, conversion to grey scale, screen captures and other manipulations.

Here are a few watermarked photos – can you tell?

Watermark Tracking

Once your images have been exported to Signili, they are automatically tracked online. It usually takes a few days for the Signili tracking app to find them after they’ve been published, but so far the tracking service seems pretty reliable.

In the Signili web app, clicking on Image Overview will bring up a page with all images that you’ve watermarked.

From there, clicking on each individual image will show the URL of every location where the Signili tracking app has found the image published online.

The tracking app identifies both watermarked images and un-watermarked matches. However, in my case the app only seems to report un-watermarked matches, even though I have only ever published watermarked versions. I suspect that this may be a reporting error – but it is a concern.

Further, the tracking period of 3 months (free) or 6 months (paid) seems very arbitrary – using Pixsy, I routinely find infringements of photographs that were originally shared many years ago.

I contacted Signili about this and they promised that the current tracking period restrictions will be extended in the future.

If you find a possible infringement on your own, you can manually check for your watermark by clicking on “Detect” and then uploading a copy of the suspected image.

This feature would be much more useful if you could just copy and paste the URL of the page where you found the suspicious image instead of having to download and upload an actual image file.

 

Using the Signili detection app, I discovered that the watermark is not 100% effective. For example, the detection app does not identify a watermark in any images from this underwater series even though all the published images were watermarked.

Even when I upload the exact watermarked image as exported (the uploaded image and checked image are the same file), the watermark is not detected. This indicates that either there is an error with the watermark or the detection – but I have no way of knowing which.

Workflow

The easiest way I have found to incorporate Signili watermarking into my photography business is to export sets of finished images directly from the Lightroom plugin to a “Signili Watermarked” folder on Dropbox.

Then, whenever I publish a blog post or share an image on Instagram, 500px, Twitter or Facebook (those are all the outlets I publish to) I just grab whatever images I need from my Signili Dropbox folder knowing that whatever image I am using has already been watermarked and is ready to go.

It is a bit of a hassle when you are on the go and want to publish something from your mobile directly to Instagram or other social media platform. In those situations you could always use the online Signili app to apply your watermark before you send it out – but it requires an extra few steps and some restraint.

Conclusion

The Signili invisible watermarking software is so easy to use, and so effective my initial thought was that this is a service that every single photographer should use before publishing a single image online.

However, to justify the business case for investing in a monthly fee for a watermarking service like Signili, I think you need have to know how to pursue monetary compensation for infringement when you find it – or at least have a plan of what to do when you identify infringement (even if that is just a DMCA take down).

Signili is a relatively new company, and I do have a few key issues with the service.

It was a surprise to discover that Signili’s watermarks are not 100% reliable. I would like to know that every image I publish does in fact have a readable watermark when it is published. If there is a problem with the watermark, I need to know before I send it out.

The tracking time limit (currently capped at 6 months) and limit on discovery attempts (currently capped at 10 per image) also seem like a major limitation. My understanding is that Signili is working to extend these – but to be useful I need to be able to track watermarked images years into the future.

Having said that, I am pretty excited about the potential for pursuing copyright claims that using an invisible digital watermark enables, so I am willing to work around the current issues identified above.

The post Signili Review – Invisible Digital Watermark to Protect Your Photos from Copyright Infringement appeared first on DIY Photography.

DIYphotography.net is one of the world’s most popular photography blogs with over 2M monthly views.

JP Danko’s weekly column is published every Thursday.