Today, I wanted to speak about personal finances of a self-employed person – photographers, artists and freelancers in general. I started Visual Watermark as a part-time project while working with my ex-employer DevExpress Inc. It was fun and easy side-project since it yields small but steady revenue and didn’t require too much effort to support it. This year I left my day job to fully concentrate on my side-project.

This move gave me an opportunity to do what engages me a lot and still much more flexibility to spend time with my small baby. On another hand, it cut our revenues in half. I don’t have “extra” money anymore, money to buy a trip to the ocean without putting aside for a few months or money that I can put into business development if necessary. I still had enough to pay my expenses but no penny above that.

What is Google+ ?

I guess that all of you have already heard about a new overwhelming project from Google – a social networking service code-named Google+.

It was born only 1 month ago, but has already got more than 10 million members and one of its basic approaches to social networking (so-called ‘Life Circles’) is agreed by many experts to be the thing that users will like very much – so much that Google+ will be able to make a revolution and replace Facebook on its throne.

Aperture is photo management software for Mac that allows you to store and refine high volumes of photos. All images are stored in a special folder called library. This means when importing photos from a camera memory card Aperture copies them into an internal storage (“library”). You can easily erase your memory card while Aperture will store original photos for you on your hard disc.

However, this makes photo watermarking a bit inconvenient since Visual Watermark maker cannot retrieve images from the library, only Aperture can. You should export your photos from the library first. This tutorial shows how this can be done.

78% percents of US photographers say their photos were being used illegally. Most likely your photos were stolen too. Can it be possible to find who is using your images? Now there is an answer. Google started an image reverse search service that uses image identification technology to find exact matches of the photo you ask it to search for. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping your photo into the search box.

Visual Watermark is a image watermarking app for Mac and Windows. Since Mac-version is a much newer program, it lacks some features existing in the Window-version. One of them is the capability to add your own logo as a watermark stored as an image file.