My company rents camera equipment, and I spent lots of time and money getting professional photographs taken of my inventory for my website. Then I found out that one of my competitors stole all of my photographs and put them on his own website! How can I protect my images?

Sadly, the digital age has made it easier than ever to rip off other people’s photos and artwork. You might want to consult with an attorney to see if you have any legal recourse, but to keep this from happening again, your best bet is to watermark your images ahead of time. A watermark superimposes text or graphics over your existing images. This prevents theft since the image is demonstrably yours, but watermarks can also build your company brand if you include your logo.

Several Mac apps let you add watermarks to your images, but our favorite is iWatermark ($20, scriptsoftware.com) because its built-in effects effectively turn it into a miniature graphics and text editor. Other solid image-watermarking programs include EasyBatchPhoto ($23.95, yellowmug.com) and ImageWell (CAD $19.95, www.xtralean.com).

iWatermark makes it easy to prevent anyone from using this image on their own website--unless they want to mangle the photo or advertise your business!

To add watermarks to PDF files, try PDFpen ($49.95, www.smileonmymac.com) or Adobe Acrobat 9 ($299 and up, www.adobe.com). And if you take a lot of screenshots like we do here at Mac|Life, Snapz Pro X ($69, www.ambrosiasw.com) can automatically add watermarks to your screenshots as you take them.