I asked Alamy for their thoughts at the time and was told: The new watermark has been proven to be successful and has already been rolled out to the image collection" By creating a completely different watermark for each image, it makes it hard to truly identify the shape and thus erase it. The shapes vary for each image and also include contributor names. The team developed a watermark randomiser so that no two watermarks are the same. Photograph: VictoriaHunter/Alamy Stock Photo ‘Regardless of whether, for me, Lockdown 2 is about productivity or simply coping, there are a couple of rituals I’m quite looking forward to.
Concerned about the risk of theft of images in its library, a popular library with a collection of about 150 million images, asked its engineers to build a watermark technology that was resistant to pattern recognition algorithm. It works using an algorithm that finds common patterns on photographs and removes watermarks leaving them exposed to unauthorised use. On Alamy, commercial images will be sold as RF and editorial images sold as RM. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo Emile Zola was an early champion of Edouard Manet, painter of Olympia, which the writer used to describe a body on a mortuary slab in Thrse Raquin. The takeover marks the first time PA Media Group has delved into the stock image sector - a move it.
These are license types used by the stock photo industry. PA Media Group has acquired the stock image provider Alamy, as part of a diversification drive. Cover credit: Renato Granieri / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper.
RM means Rights Managed and means the customer can only use the image for a specified use. protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. "If you have images with any image libraries you will be concerned to know that there is such a thing as automatic watermark extraction. RF means Royalty Free and the customer can use the image again and again for different uses but only pays once.
There was a piece about this issue in last autumn's issue of Canon's EOS Magazine - I've quoted it below with only slight editing to remove the name of the library concerned (it's not Alamy!):