Ahh the pain, the pain. I have been posting my photography online since at least 2006, and it has been constantly stolen. Even now, so many wallpaper sites give away my photos without even mentioning my name (some even claiming the photos are theirs).
I finally wised up and started leaving watermarks on everything I post on Hive.
But those are all very useful services you link to. Thanks for pointing them out!
In the past I have been watermarking as well but got tired of it. Remember what @lightcaptured was writing. Some people even go through the effort of reading watermarks. As crazy as it sounds. So I stick with creating my own style (I am very far from it) and then people notice. In some aspects in Light Painting people know me by now. That helps.
Glad you like the blob post.
Indeed. Everything could be "fixed" in Photoshop. Big logos and "curly" signatures only drive me away.
I always put my tiny logo at the bottom, right-hand side of my images. As I 99% of the time post-process in Lightroom, that happens automatically on export, it doesn't cost me even a second.
Yes, I could absolutely tell an image is your, you definitely have your own style already, kudos! That is extremely hard to achieve, IMHO.
With regards to the "wallpapers" sites.
I figured out this kind of theft comes generally from sites outside EU that utilize the API of Instagram.
So once I deleted my public profile there, all that disappeared.
Funny how if you try downloading images from Instagram, they are in low resolution and high JPEG compression, but through the IG API everybody has access to the original content. It was like that back then at the time I deleted my account there. I wrote several times to the Instagram legal team, nobody gave a fuck. So I did that same in return. I don't need them.