Using Our Photos
Catholics, we can do better.
This is one of our most popular photos, along with several other photos of rosaries in my hand. And they’ve been stolen and circulated all over Pinterest and Catholic Instagram without any credit to our business, used to promote influencer pages and businesses that aren’t affiliated with us.
And I’ll admit it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating to see our photos with our handmade rosaries on pages with hundreds of thousands - sometimes millions - of followers and promoting someone else’s business or influencer aesthetic. Those photos are taken from our website and social media pages without permission and used to promote someone else’s products. It’s theft.
We’ve had people finally find Livolsi Rosaries, the source of the photos, and message us that they’ve seen us all over Pinterest but couldn’t find our rosaries! Every photo I upload is linked to our website. So someone downloads a photo and uploads it specifically to share without the link instead of just repinning it.
Someone suggested we watermark, which is an extra editing step and time for me, and I learned there’s virtually no point because with an app you can quickly and without charge remove the watermark (which frankly should be illegal because it’s done solely to steal someone else’s work).
We worked hard to get our business to where it is. It takes time to create a product, take and edit photos, and upload them to our site and social media.
I would expect this in the secular world, but not the Catholic sphere. Let’s normalize not using photos we don’t own. Let’s normalize not taking photos from others to boost one’s views and create “content” for one’s aesthetic page. Let’s normalize using our own photos or asking permission and giving credit to the people who we source from.
