We received a call from a new customer a couple of weeks ago. They needed help, as their website contained an image belonging to someone else, and unfortunately, they were being pursued for a financial claim in relation to use of the image.

Upon investigation, it became clear that image had been on their website for seven years, and was added by the original designer but belonged to a professional photographer who never gave permission, so they had no real case to argue, and there is nothing we could do to mitigate the fine.

However, in order to help them avoid further issues in the future, we invited them to the BY Design office, and we went through every photo on the site with them to cross check the origin and ownership. We showed them how to fully delete images from the media library, as opposed to just deleting the image from the page itself.

The reason for this is that website images can be directly indexed in Google Images, based on their unique URL (address) in the media folder. So, even though they had deleted the image from the page, it could still be found online, putting them at risk of a second fine.

Thankfully, all their images are now fully verified and they can move forward with confidence, putting this episode behind them.

It is worth doing a full check on your website images to check nothing has slipped under the radar. If you need help with this, just reach out to BYD.