[jkovasc]

Hi all, I am new to the site (and photography)and would like to add a few of my photos to the gallery, however, I was wondering if i need to protect them or something as i have never posted photos before and am quite new to the scene in general. All advise is more than welcome

[GfK]

What do you mean by 'protected'?

[jkovasc]

well i have been looking at the photos that are here and some of them are fantastic, whats to stop someone just saving them onto their hard drive and doing whatever they want with them.

[Joe T]

The low resolution means that whatever you save is practically unprintable. This means that in terms of copyright tehft, you are unlikely to have a problem. However, I guess they can still be stolen for use on the web.

[jkovasc]

Thanks Joe, I will have a look through and put a few in the gallery

[Steep]

If you think your work is worth it and want to protect it you could add a digital watermark. http://www.digimarc.com/mypicturemarc/ it'll cost you though, from $79.

[fingerz]

It is impossible to protect images.

If you stop people from right-clicking on them, they'll just drag and drop it. If you stop people from being able to drag and drop, they'll just take a screen greb and paste it into Photoshop. Whatever you try to do, there will be a way round it so the best advice is not to bother and only show things at a resolution where you don't mind people using it.

You can watermark images but then you're stopping the photo from being seen in it's full glory. Unless you watermark it at the very edge, but then people can grab the image and crop out the watermark.

You really can't stop people so don't try. Just accept the sharing, 'everything is free' nature of the internet. It works both ways. You get access to a lot of free stuff too so it's fair to give something back.

[Matty]

take bad photos like me, no-one wants to nick them anyway

[MyPix]

Originally Posted by Matty

take bad photos like me, no-one wants to nick them anyway

nuff said.........

MyPix

[Steep]

Originally Posted by fingerz

You can watermark images but then you're stopping the photo from being seen in it's full glory. Unless you watermark it at the very edge, but then people can grab the image and crop out the watermark.

I don't know if you read the info on the site I posted fingerz but digital watermarking is not like a visible watermark on paper. Digimarc is your information, name etc encoded within the image data in such a way that it can't be easily removed. You need a special reader or a ps plugin to see it and it's read in much the same was as exif info. ie you see it as text in a seperate window.

[fingerz]

Originally Posted by Steep

I don't know if you read the info on the site I posted fingerz but digital watermarking is not like a visible watermark on paper. Digimarc is your information, name etc encoded within the image data in such a way that it can't be easily removed. You need a special reader or a ps plugin to see it and it's read in much the same was as exif info. ie you see it as text in a seperate window.

How to beat Digimarc in four easy steps:

Step 1 - Press the 'Print Screen' button on your keyboard.

Step 2 - Open Photoshop and create a new, blank image.

Step 3 - Press CTRL + V (or do Edit > Paste).

Step 4 - Crop out the browser window and rest of the stuff you don't want and save the image as whatever you like.

Like I said, there's no point trying. You're only making extra work for yourself.

[Steep]

Ok but that would only give you a low resolution image though, not much good for selling on and making a profit from.

[fingerz]

The image will be exactly the same resolution as it was on the web (or wherever you saw it before you did the screen grab).

More often than not, these will be fairly low res and that's why I take the view that there's no point trying to protect them. It kinda goes against the whhole point of the net anyway and you could end up shooting yourself in the foot because very often people forward stuff they like to their mates (or post it on a forum like this) which would get you more exposure.

[Liberalis]

I had an idea about this, imagine if you had an image open on your screen and you intended to copy it using "Prt Scr", if you had a semi transparent copyright notice that moved with your pointer when-ever it was over the image, when the pointer was elsewhere the notice becomes solid in the centre of the shot. You could still see the image clearly, but print screen would still leave your info on it.

What you think ? easy to setup or not ?

[Steve]

Print screen usually ignores the pointer

[Liberalis]

If thats the case, the print screen image would leave a solid copyright in the middle of the shot

[Steve]

Sorry I misunderstood, but from your description and my rather poor webskill knowledge you would be talking about some sort of "on mouse over" command that would display a copywirted version when the mouse was not over it and a "clean one" when it was, that poses two problems that I see, one is that every image would require two versions (twice the storage space) and the other is that when you mouse over the image to see it properly, if you them print screen you would still get a full clean image? Like I said my web skills are not very good though so I could be wrong.

[SammyC]

There'd always be a way around this kind of protection. I think you have to take the Fingerz point of view, just accept that the image is not big enough to be used in any/many places.