Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Photo Theft is so Sketchy. I'm talking to YOU!

This morning I remembered that I had this thing on my blog called statcounter.  I put it on there when I first started the blog and promptly forgot  about it.   I found a link to it this morning when digging around my email.

Statcounter, logs the traffic on your site.  It also tells what images have been downloaded.  I noticed that my chocolate stripes tomato image was rather popular so I got curious and went to google to see what I could see.  What I found is that my photo, taken on my kitchen counter, has been poorly reproduced at an heirloom gardening site  What this tells me is this:  1) This company is sketchy.  2.  This company apparently is unable to grow its own decent chocolate stripes tomatoes.  Every tomato on that plant is a work of art.  Thus I must deduce that since they have had to resort to stealing an image, they are incapable of growing their own fruit and must be getting seeds from who know's where.

I've heard about this sort of thing happening from other tomato growers.  Never thought I would see one of my pictures stolen though.  Shame on you .  If I could get your email link to open I'd tell you directly.  For now I'll have to just call you out on multiple tomato and gardening forums and hope someone gets the message and corrects their mistake.

Here is the link to my post about MY tomato.

Update:  Found an email for them and sent a request to remove the image.  Also posted my complaint at tomatoville where it looks like they may read.

Update #2  Wow, that was fast.  They did not respond to my email, however the photo has now been taken down.   Good.

Update #3 Got a nice email from the site owner.  I'm removing the links to the name.  I'm terrible at holding a grudge.  :)

6 comments:

mrbrownthumb said...

Congrats on getting the picture taken down. Although, next time take a screen grab, because they could then say it never happened and probably make some legal trouble for you.

stone said...

Good job getting the picture taken down... I just had an entire post scraped, they took my text and 6 or 7 pictures and unlinked my links!
I got that one taken down... then found the same post copied by someone else! I haven't gotten the second site to take it down yet... Then there's this other site that reposted half of my daylily page...

Back to your tomato pic... when I had a site that hot linked to one of my pictures recently, I renamed the picture, and substituted another one for the hot linker... it's still on their page!

There's a code that you can use to stop people from hotlinking your pictures... but not from blogspot...
You might be interested in the discussion on this thread:
Images count as backlinks

admin said...

Yay, congrats on getting it taken down.

Stacy said...

Stone that is brilliant. I'm filing that away for the future!

Rachel: I decided to remove the name of the site, since they sent me a very nice apology. Since your comment had their name in it and I couldn't figure out how to edit it out, I deleted it, sorry!

MBT: Oh I have screen shots, or snagits to be more precise. : )

Prairie Cat said...

Sorry to hear about the hassle you had to go through! Makes you wonder how many other pictures that site had 'borrowed.'

It is a lovely picture, though. :)

Anonymous said...

I was at a sale they participated in on Saturday in Birmingham. Their website has a number of issues. I think the situationis that these are good people who are just now feeling their way on the web