If you are wondering why another user has a copy of photos you uploaded to your site, we will explain how this can happen and how you can change your settings.
1. Copying photos through online Smart Matches is a Premium feature available to members with a site subscription and might be how the other user received their copy of your photos. You can learn about this feature here:
How do I save information from Smart Matches to my family tree on the online family site?
Your photos were possibly therefore not “stolen” in the sense that the other user downloaded and reuploaded your photos to their tree and it is more likely that they were copied through SmartMatches™.
If you do not wish to allow others to copy photos from your site through Smart Matches™ please change the settings for Smart Matching™ in your family tree.
Read the following article for the detailed explanation:
How do I change the Smart Matches settings for my online family tree?
Please pay attention that Settings are specific for each tree, so if you have more than one tree on your family site, make sure to change the settings for each of them.
2. In addition, other users might have received a Photo Discovery where they received a variety of photos of someone in their family tree, photos other users, like you, uploaded to their respective family site and made available to other users. You can learn about this feature here: What are Photo Discoveries™?
If you do not wish to allow others to copy photos from your site through Smart Matches™and have already changed the settings for Smart Matching™ in your family tree, this will also take effect for the Photo Discoveries.
3. It is of course possible that other users found your photos via the Search engine and manually downloaded the photos via their browser and manually uploaded them to their family site and did not receive your photos via any MyHeritage feature.
If you don’t want your photos to show up in the Search engine for other users to find, you can disable that by following the instructions in this article:
Can I remove my data from the MyHeritage Search Engine?
4. Lastly, other users are able to download thumbnails or take screenshots of what they see shown on their screen and can then upload those photos to their own site. It is technically not possible for us to stop users from doing this.
You can find a full overview of all our privacy settings here:
What are the privacy options for my family site?