Maps being ripped off again - like Pinterest

[Redrobes]

Had some more reports of some artwork being taken from the guild and posted to other sites without artists approval. In some cases its been reported that the posts on the other sites have claimed ownership of some of the pieces.

As a website, if you post your artwork in the forums and you can get to it with a browser then there is nothing the site can do to stop people taking it because their browser has a local copy. So within the image you should sign it or mark the author where possible and if your concerned about it then do it in a way that makes the signature hard to remove from the artwork.

You can get fancy apps which embed codes into the pixels with some success and they form two groups. There are those that try to do it invisibly so that you can prove a piece of art was yours in retrospect - like in a court case over the ownership. And the other is where it modifies the image in a way that makes it obvious that the signature is part of the image but is hard to remove.

There has been a thread about this which I will try to link to where I discussed a way to modify an image with your copyright notice or logo. You take a small image of your signature and create an image which has areas slightly lighter or darker where you stamp the signature several times. Its a bit tedious.

So I have written some apps for windows and linux. Now for the windows ones I would expect them to work - not so sure about linux because of the base library sharing and this code is not open source so YMMV. If your on a Mac then your outta luck unless you can run windows apps in emulation.

The app is a command line one so there is only one file. There is no installer and you run it by opening a command prompt and typing the app name in. You can put the command line app into a script this way or embed it into a makefile or whatever and watermark your whole collection in one go. I'll post some images of how to run it. Its a very basic watermarking tool but its easy to use and very quick. Quick and dirty as we say !

There is a zip for windows and a zip for linux (zip because the site wont let me upload tar.gz). Within the windows zip there is a 32bit and a 64bit version of the app but they are otherwise exactly the same. In linux its obviously 64bit and I have put .exe on the end of the filename just to keep it clear.

If you have any issues with it then let me know - pm me. You can give it to whoever you want for free but I dont do open source so dont ask for the code. Also, check it for viruses as these are executables !