Best way to not get photos ripped off?

On 19 Aug 2008, at 04:59, Rocky Slaughter wrote:

I am a photographer and wish to post several pictures on a website
for purchase. What is the best way in Freeway to ensure that they
are not simply copy/pasted and printed?

I too am a photographer, and I’ve seen this old chestnut come up every
few months on every Web design forum I’ve belonged to in fifteen
years. The short answer is that there is no way to do it, at all, and
my advice would be simply to go ahead and not worry about it.

The longer answer is that there are numerous ways of doing what the
particularly paranoid call ‘making it more difficult for them’. These
involve disabling the ability to right-click in the browser (bad call
— right clicking on many things is an asset to your viewers),
placing a transparent picture over the top so that when they try to
right-click, they download that instead, and various bits of
JavaScript that do weird and whacky things.

Trouble is, there’s no point in ‘making it more difficult’ because
it’s laughably easy to take a screenshot of anything visible on the
screen, which is basically why all these tricks are pointless. The
only thing that’s left is to deface your picture with a watermark (no
thanks) or to make it so ridiculously small it loses any impact it
might have had.

Best way? Put 'em up, big and bold, glory in them, feel good about it,
show them off nicely, and don’t forget: if someone steals one, they
have a bigger problem than you do. It might be an idea to make sure
the pictures include all your metadata, contact details etc, which
means avoiding Photoshop’s ‘Save for Web’ as it strips it all out.

PS: Come to think of it, there IS one little thing I came across the
other day which I don’t dislike: it’s a bit of code that, when you
right-click or try to drag, pops up a little message warning you that
the picture is copyright of the photographer. That I don’t mind.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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Many of you know that I’m a photographer in my “other life” (http://www.ianschrayphotography.com). I echo Paul’s thoughts completely.

I think it’s appropriate to take a certain amount of work to prevent casual copying. That is, the simple drag-and-drop of images from your site to a user’s desktop. There are tons of ways to do this, and the Image Guardian Action that Dan mentioned is a very good one.

I personally use Weaver’s MooTools Slimbox Action (part of his MooTools Suite: http://www.coastalrugs.com/Actions/mootoolssuite.html). This creates nice slideshows that are impossible to drag out of the browser window.

Still no protection from a screen shot, of course… :slight_smile:

-ian


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Message to Paul Bradforth:

What is the"Little thing" that you mentioned in your cote below and where I can get it and how can be installed???

““PS: Come to think of it, there IS one little thing I came across the other day which I don’t dislike: it’s a bit of code that, when you right-click or try to drag, pops up a little message warning you that the picture is copyright of the photographer. That I don’t mind.””

best wishes,

Dan Demetriad

http://www.demetriad.com


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Hi Dan; I’m afraid I’ve no idea as it was months ago on some site or other. As you may have gathered, I don’t take much notice of things that ‘stop’ people ‘stealing’ pictures, and I didn’t take much notice of this one either; I just thought ‘that’s a nice idea which isn’t actually insulting’, but didn’t bookmark the page or anything.

I saw one the other day that I really liked: it was a little icon that lit up when you dragged a picture that said ‘drag to share!’. Now that, I like :wink: I’m perfectly serious; the whole ethos of the Web is to help people to do things, not stop them.


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Thanks Paul.

Dan


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Hi,

I used to apply the ‘Image Guardian’ action that when someone clicked on an image a pop up would say ‘B***er Off ©!’ or words to that effect. I think the action might still have some relevence in certain instances but now I really don’t care that much. There’s brilliant photography throughout the web and much far superior (or should that be equal:) to my own, so I would be rather chuffed if someone used an image of mine - then I’d sue of course. In fact I now think the bigger the better, now that we can. I love the Boston Globe Big Picture website and a recent find, here: Shorpy Historical Picture Archive :: Pardridge & Blackwell: 1915 high-resolution photo thats BIG !

Unless you think there’ll be people just ready to rip your pictures off then I really wouldn’t worry about it.

s


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Thanks.

Dan Demetriad

http://www.demetriad.com


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Hi all,

In hindsight (I’ve had two years to reflect… ) I think Paul was right. There’s really no realistic way to protect images and doing so just makes you look rude. Sometimes people want to use your images for things they wouldn’t buy. If you let them use the images, it may equal future business for your real images.

I think the only real secret to all of this is to upload images in extremely low resolution. That way they cannot be duplicated for print.


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