When I share a picture online, I want people to think about the picture, not an intrusive watermark,

At the same time, I know that the metadata that accompanies my photos and includes my name and copyright information often gets stripped out of the image.

I don't like that either.

So I'm faced with the challenge of how to best share my photos and keep my name with them.

First of all, I'm going to continue using metadata. If you're not up to speed with that, applications such as Aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop, allow you to apply your name, copyright, website, and other data to the IPTC fields that live in the file header of the picture.

As long as someone or some app doesn't remove that information, it's always there. Personally, I wish there were a way to lock the IPTC fields after I've populated them. But as of now, I don't know how.

So that leads to watermarking, which is embedding my name in the actual image. There are all sorts of ways to do this, but my current favorite is an iOS app called Tagg.ly. It's easy and fairly attractive.

If someone wanted to, they could crop out my Tagg.ly watermark. That wouldn't be very nice, but I'm sure it happens.

What I'm not going to do is put a giant watermark in the middle of my photo. For me, it ruins the viewer's experience.

I'm curious as to how you approach this.

To watermark or not.

That is the question.

-Derrick