Where Do You Get Dental Website Photos?

A Townie friend of mine, Lisa Weber of ProductionFinder.com, recently related this story that empha­sizes 3 extremely impor­tant points:

1. Be sure that your web­site pho­tos are legitimate,
2. Why you should use your OWN pho­tos on your web­site, and
3. Take the appro­pri­ate steps to pro­tect your photos.

I’ll be post­ing more on how to get your own pho­tos onto your web­site in an attrac­tive for­mat, as well as on how to pro­tect your pho­tos (within lim­its) in upcom­ing blog posts.

And now, in Lisa’s own words:

I thought I’d post a recent sit­u­a­tion because my guess is it’s more com­mon than you might think. This will be long so bear with me.  This is what hap­pened recently:

Client emailed me to inquire about my ser­vices and we agreed to talk by phone the fol­low­ing day.  I checked out the name online to see where the prac­tice was and take a tour of the web­site.  A web­site can tell me quite a bit about a prac­tice, so I usu­ally pop into all of the pages.  I looked at the Smile Gallery and saw some very famil­iar smiles.

The images (all of them) were images I’d actu­ally par­tic­i­pated in tak­ing in a prac­tice I used to work in, and now work for on a con­sult­ing basis.  I knew the names asso­ci­ated with those smiles.  What are the chances of my stum­bling on those images?  Pretty darn close to nil.  Before assign­ing blame to the den­tist, I decided to check out the web designer.  I found 5 web­sites for den­tists in that same area of Ari­zona using the exact same images.  There were a few addi­tional images on sev­eral of them but the gal­leries were vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal.  That’s when I assumed the den­tists were under the impres­sion they were stock images and the web designer had been the one who had likely just copied and pasted them.  They were all small images, saved as jpegs with the dif­fer­ent prac­tices names,  num­bered sequentially.

I saved an archived ver­sion of all the sites in ques­tion prior to doing any­thing and then called the web designer.  I was unable to get a per­son, so left a mes­sage and also sent an email.  I then began to con­tact their clients and tell them what the sit­u­a­tion was, explain­ing that our assump­tion was that they had no idea those images weren’t avail­able for use.  Each of the offices were able to get the images removed from their sites.  I searched again and found yet another den­tal web­site using them and con­tacted that prac­tice last night.  Speak­ing with an incred­i­ble OM, I explained the his­tory and that my only pur­pose is to get the images removed and we do not hold the den­tist respon­si­ble at this time.  I explained that the web designer had placed her doc­tor in a very pre­car­i­ous posi­tion because ulti­mately it was his lia­bil­ity.  I rec­om­mended they pull out the orig­i­nal con­tract to see if the web designer rep­re­sented that he had all rights to the images he was going to use.

After receiv­ing my mes­sage that if I didn’t receive a call by close of busi­ness, I would rely on our attor­ney to make any future com­mu­ni­ca­tions, I received a call from the sales per­son from the Web designer.  He stated that although he believed he got all the images from a Lum­i­neer site, he would go ahead and remove them.  He said his busi­ness was no longer in oper­a­tion, regard­less.  I asked him if his clients knew this and he assured me that they did.  I men­tioned that I had spo­ken with sev­eral den­tists in the past week who would be very sur­prised that they were no longer in busi­ness.  I also men­tioned that not only were the images not from a Lum­i­neer site, but none of them dis­played a Lum­i­neer, since that is a prod­uct that nei­ther doc­tor has ever used.  He seemed to feel it might be pos­si­ble they were not the images I felt they were until I indi­cated that by “par­tic­i­pat­ing” in the pho­tog­ra­phy, I meant I was actu­ally in the room when those images were taken, cropped them and have them saved on flash dri­ves along with a few thou­sand other images that I have been recently view­ing for inclu­sion in the new web­site once it goes live.   Those Before and After images being shown in Ari­zona were born and raised in Mid­dle­burg Virginia.

Not only did this web designer copy and paste the images (from an out­dated web­site) but they used the iden­ti­cal images in a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket for offices that were geo­graph­i­cally close to each other!  One image in par­tic­u­lar really ticked me off because it was prob­a­bly the most beau­ti­ful after pic I have ever seen of an implant crown on a cen­tral after months of tis­sue devel­op­ment and a dead-on per­fect shade and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion match by the ceramist.  Those aren’t easy to do and was a tes­ta­ment to that par­tic­u­lar dentist’s skill.   That after pic should have been earned, not copied and pasted.

So.….very long story.…but.….I would strongly rec­om­mend that you ver­ify that images used in your web­site (all of them) have clear records of hav­ing been obtained for your use, either by you or by your web­de­signer.  This is likely going to be a big­ger prob­lem very quickly, and it’s only a mat­ter of time till peo­ple run into a den­tist who isn’t as rea­son­able as the one I worked for.  I feel like a detec­tive this week, but I’m glad I stum­bled on those pics, that’s for certain. I think the doc­tor that first con­tacted me is glad I did as well.

I, for one, am grate­ful that there are peo­ple like Lisa out there, who will do the right thing by both the den­tists who were ripped off by their web designer, as well as by the den­tist to whom the patients and pho­tos belong.  Who knows how far those pho­tos might have spread, were it not for Lisa’s vigilance.