Unauthorized usages

There is software/web resources that will allow you to search the web to find uses of images that you own. One I think is a standalone program called TinEye and another is an add-on for Firefox called something like I-shot-your-band. I assume you can find them with Google.

many, many thanks

Another way that I use is to set up a Google alert for a credit. http://www.google.com/alerts
One of my alerts is for “Jim O’Connell for the New York Times” which is how I am credited for the Times. It’s surprising how many places will steal your photo, give you credit, but never think of paying you.
Also, Google Reverse Image Search:
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html
Search for your recent and popular images and see who is using it.

You’ll probably find a lot of blogs. If they are non-commercial, I tend to ignore them.
Jim

I wasn’t aware of I-shot-your-hand, I’ll check it out (even when I switched from Firefox to Chrome…).
I didn’t have any luck with Tin Eye, but there’s also a plug-in for Firefox called Copyright Infringment something that lets you right click and Google search for your image, it’s quite effective. There’s an almost identical version for Chrome that’s called simply Search “Google with this image”, it works just as well.

Jim, a month ago, when musician Ravi Shankar died, a Buenos Aires newspaper used a picture of mine of Indian guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that I shared with a free newspaper called Argentina Independent who are friends of mine. They cropped the picture to remove the Indy’s watermark featuring my name. I found it, and send them a mail asking who sould I send the invoice. Not surprisingly, I got an answer, they resented my accusation of them stealing my picture, and told me that by looking at my web they didn’t find the picture, so how come?, where did they steal it from. If I proved them the image was mine they would give me credit. To which I answered with the link, and that I don’t eat credits thank you very much, better if you just take it down if you won’t pay for it.
Funny thing, the picture being of the wrong person didn’t bother them, if we agreed on the credit they would have probably let it as is. BTW, MTV also used that picture but took it down when they realized the mistake, but hundreds of blogs and sites got the news from them and you still see the picture of the Indian guru illustrating the news of the musician’s death.

I guess that brings me to a point: good luck doing something when you find an image of yours is being used, most of the time, the best you can do is getting it down.

Many, many thanks to all of you. I truly appreciate your suggestions, advice, etc.