sunnyside7

"for moving insects, it sometimes can be difficult, but for most of other things, not a problem..."

Yes, for fascinating tripod-mounted pictures of rocks in a vacuum it's fine I agree. For any...

"Why do you need AF for macro?!"

Have you ever tried to manually focus on a moving insect while supporting your bodyweight with one hand and steadying your camera with the other?

On the contrary, smartphones are clearly "good enough" for people who take pictures every hour of every day.

I guess he won't mind if we empty his "virtual" bank account as long as we don't steal the pennies from his pocket.

And if you don't want to get robbed never carry any money right? Silly argument.

Every victory is sweet. That doesn't make it a reliable income stream sadly.

I did ask you to provide examples of cases where you've recovered thousands of dollars from single copyright infringements. You haven't, but please do. I'm sure we can all learn from your...

Worth invoicing them yourself then I suggest. Most respectable organisations will pay.

Actually Pixsy's automated import options do include SmugMug.

More typically you'll find an anonymous blogger using your image in a country whose language you don't speak, the site has no contact information, or else they fail to respond. Not so simples.

Those are a tiny minority of cases in my experience. The types of companies you describe would be unlikely to steal images.

The standard Pixsy trial already includes 500 free images so you're not missing out on much. It's designed to index sites like Flickr and Photoshelter automatically. SmugMug may be designed...

Few serious photographers believe that image theft is good advertising. It simply encourages further unauthorised, unpaid use. If you want to give your images away for free then specify the...

So why bother with your watermark if that's your attitude? Your bank account is also "on the internet".

It would be highly unusual to recover thousands of dollars for a single copyright infringement. Can you give an example? More usually you can only expect to recover a lost licence fee.

You've never had anyone remove your watermark? A watermark may reduce the possibility of images becoming 'orphaned' but will not guarantee against deliberate copyright theft.

Pixsy is great, but... 1K images is nothing. In my experience their lawyers will only accept lucrative cases which are easy to win and within a limited number of countries. 10 DMCA takedowns is...

It's easy to "slap people" with an invoice. It's less easy to get paid. How much of the $6K did you recover and for what?

I guess they wouldn't pursue this course of action unless costs were rapidly mounting to unsustainable levels.

Even if that service had doubled from $1 to $2? What a weird principle.