Should I be mad about this?

[AnneWynne]

Some options:
If you care about your relationship with your friend, contact her and politly explain your upset about her using your image as she did. She probably considers it her photo and did not think you would be peturbed by her sending it into the contest. You can ask her to get the photo withdrawn or you can contact the contest and explain your situation and either ask for it to be withdrawn or substitute a _watermarked_ image (your choice). But whatever you do, you are giving her a heads up that you want the image either removed or replaced.

If you don't really care about your relationship, you can simply contact the contest, explain the image was used without permission, and they need to take it down. Follow-up with a message to your friend explaining why you took this course of action. This is a little harsher than the first option.

Watermark _all_ of your freebies (prints and negatives). They get the unwatermarked image _only_ if they pay, and pay a respectable amount, for a watermark-free image.
Watermark _all_ images you have taken for other people that you post online.

My 2 cents....

[Jim Poor]

Look into the terms of the other contest. If no rights are given up then I'd probably let it go.

The reason "we" prohibit contest entry is because many of the contests are just a way to get a bunch of free images to use for commercial use with no compensation to the photographers.

A contest that says "show me a photo so I can choose a winner" is different. There is no rights grab, there is no real misuse.

I'm going to be running a similar contest where folks send me a photo (any photo) of their dog for a chance to win a complementary fine art portrait session with Canines In Art.

The bigger thing to look into is why she went to another photographer instead of back to you. She may be just the type of person that enters contests on a whim, or she could be looking for a different style than yours. Even worse, she could have decided she doesn't like your work and is looking elsewhere.

You may never know, but you surely won't know if you don't ask.

[mandyatm]

I am not worried that she didn't like my work. I know that she did. She already asked how booked I was so she knew how far in advance to book her maternity/newborn pics as she is expecting again. But she is over an hour away from me and my prices have increased a bit since our session, and I don't blame her for trying to get a free session. I don't mind her entering the contest and am not offended by that, but I do not like my image on another photographer's page.

We aren't friends outside of our client relationship, but she added me as a friend on Facebook so that I could tag her in the images. I totally agree that working with friends is a PITA!!!! If she were my friend I would definitely ask her to remove it. I think Anne had a good suggestion, I could email the contest holder and just ask her to substitute a watermarked version.

But yeah, I don't think she read the contract and I don't want to piss her off as a client. However, if I ask the other photographer to substitute it, she will lose all her votes for the image.