If you are a photographer and concerned about your images being stolen there are a few ways to protect them. The first way to protect them is to watermark them, a simple watermark can make it almost impossible to steal your work, personally I a fairly large watermark in the bottom left hand corner of images I upload to flickr that is transparent so it doesnt obstruct the image too much, every image I upload online is either watermarked or uploaded to a site that adds a watermark, I have 2 exceptions to that, they are twitter and my blog. Both of these I reduce the size of the image to 500×500 or smaller so I dont see their is a significant threat of theft. I also add copyright information in the metadata of the image, this cannot stop your images being stolen but it can help identify them if they are stolen and prove they are yours. I use Lightroom and have the copyright information setup in a preset on every image I upload to lightroom, I also have the watermark as a preset to all images I publish to flickr.
For me although these steps dont make me 100% safe from image theft they will help a lot and are simple steps and arent time consuming. As important as watermarking and adding the metadata to my images is making sure the websites I am uploading my images to are safe, I always keep to well know and well established sites like flickr, pixoto, behance & facebook.
If you are concerned your images have been stolen there is a nice little feature in Google images that reverse searches your image, so if you go to the google images site, then drag an image to the seach box google will search and try and find your image online, although this isnt 100% accurate it is worth using and its free!
Darren Hanks Photography 