How do I protect the copyright of the photos on my sites & blogs? Should I add a watermark or just the copyright note or both?
Depending on the nature of your photos and how much protection you want to give them, I'd do both. Legally speaking you don't need to do either, but what the law says and what is reality is two different things.
Very good point there! How do I add copyright information? Using paint? Since I don't have photoshop?
I was wondering the same thing about some photos. I suggest the same thing that I'll be doing. I'll check out at least 5 professional photographers and see what they do. I know they resize stuff in some cases.
This is a good point, never post a photo on the Internet at a larger size or higher quality than is necessary for the purpose. Most importantly never post it at full size. This ensures you have a high quality large master that you can use as proof that it is your photo if necessary.
No matter what you do, if you post any image on the internet someone will try and rip it off. There are a lot of ways of reducing the usefulness of the image to anyone else. You could put some sort of watermark/wordmark on the picture, but in a lot of cases this detracts somewhat from the image. I have a photoblog, and what I do is to only post an image at the absolute minimum quality/size that is acceptable. This at times results in images that are much lower in quality than the originals, and hopefully not usable by anyone else. A picture that is 40% jpg quality at no more than 500 pixels is probably still good enough to view, without being good enough to even print. With such a high jpg compression, any subsequent edits will create an image that is almost worthless with a lot of artifacts.