I was just curious to know if any of you here are ever get paranoid about people stealing your images and using them as their own. I noticed that many of us here have images that are 800x600 (or larger) on our blogs. I just get a little hesitant to post my best stuff on the blog since it's so easy for others to steal them. I remember seeing a thread earlier this year about someone stealing and using Ed's images... and claiming them to be their own. Another incident I remember reading about was about Lara Jade (a young flickr photographer) who actually went to an photo show, and saw her photos enlarged and being sold by another girl.
What are your thoughts on this? Anyone know if there are ways to prevent people from downloading your images from the blog?
I'm using the Prophotoblog theme version 1. This link gives instructions on how to disable right-clicking.
I am guessing that if you google hard enough you should be able to find ways of disabling saving of images from your blog.
We had an ex-client snag a couple off our site before I instituted protective measures. I've since converted every single photo to be displayed via a CSS background-image property and have not had it happen again. It's defeatable, yes, but it takes more than your average computer user to do it.
Disabling the right click thing is very annoying (if it's the kind that brings up a popup text box if you right click)... so much so, that I don't like visiting sites that have that feature. I know it does the job, but I'm not a fan. Ryan, if it's not too much trouble, could you elaborate a bit on your method or maybe send a PM my way.
Any average computer user nowadays knows how to use the print screen button.
The disable right click may be more of a hindrance. Use a nice watermark on your logos and post them at 600-800 pixels longest side and you should be fine. If anybody stole my images then it's easy, there is a copyright law. =)
I'm more paranoid about budget photographers educating themselves from my work.
That will always happen to some degree and i have no problem with someone serious about trying to make a career from photography but all those who just want to make $200 on the weekend and keep their normal job are getting one awesome education via our blogs.
I currently have my screen resolution set at 1024x768, and if I remember correctly, so do about 70% of computer users. So if I were to do a full screen image at that resolution and you decided to steal it, the best you might get out of it would be a 5x7, maybe an 8x10. But I'm not going to do a full screen image anyway, so you'd be lucky to get a decent 4x6 from your theft. Disabling right clicking helps, but the image file still ends up on the local computer. It takes a little work to find it, but it's not that hard. Make the image small, but not too small, and don't worry about it.
Sahid Limon wrote:
Disabling the right click thing is very annoying (if it's the kind that brings up a popup text box if you right click)... so much so, that I don't like visiting sites that have that feature. I know it does the job, but I'm not a fan. Ryan, if it's not too much trouble, could you elaborate a bit on your method or maybe send a PM my way.
Here's what we do. It doesn't cover every option, but it covers the majority, which is all you can reasonably hope for.
Print-only stylesheet
.photo
{
display: none; /* prevents it from displaying when printed */
}
This is tedious to do by hand, so having some sort of content management system to generate most of it for you is very, very useful. I am also a software developer so that part was not a problem for us.
All photos have a permanent copyright watermark on the lower right corner or lower center, depending on the context. I have also created a javascript system to display a giant watermark over photos when the browser window loses focus (like when switching to a specialty screen capture app), but that is non-trivial to implement so I won't cover it here.
David.G wrote:
I currently have my screen resolution set at 1024x768, and if I remember correctly, so do about 70% of computer users. So if I were to do a full screen image at that resolution and you decided to steal it, the best you might get out of it would be a 5x7, maybe an 8x10. But I'm not going to do a full screen image anyway, so you'd be lucky to get a decent 4x6 from your theft. Disabling right clicking helps, but the image file still ends up on the local computer. It takes a little work to find it, but it's not that hard. Make the image small, but not too small, and don't worry about it....Show more →
That was a while ago, with advanced manufacturing methods, improved technology, etc, your average monitor is becoming bigger and bigger. I did a search on wikipedia a couple months ago and it stated that 40% of all internet users had a screen resolution of 1280x1024. The 1024x768 was standard a few years back, but things do change (800x600 was standard for a while too I believe).
This is tedious to do by hand, so having some sort of content management system to generate most of it for you is very, very useful. I am also a software developer so that part was not a problem for us.
It still doesn't help fix the print screen function. Might as well just put a nice and simple watermark. A plain all white signature with anti-alias in one of the corners (I prefer bottom right) will most likely do. Or you can replace the signature with any form of logo, partly transparent to help eff things up in case they try to clone it out. =)
They can crop it, but cropping an already web-sized image won't get you any quality when printed.
Cool. Thanks for the tip Ryan. Unfortunately, I'm NOT a software engineer... and just getting the blog customized alone took a month... so who knows if I'll be able to implement it. Thanks for sharing regardless.
As per the screen resolution thing, I've also read that 50% or so users have 1280x1024 set as their standard. I've been using that for about 2 years now myself. My watermark is on every image, but it's not that hard to remove and clone out watermark these days. I'm not really worried about people showing off the work and claiming it that it's theirs... I just hate the idea of them actually editing my image and then showing that off. I've had this happen to me once from my flickr site with one of my most popular images.
If the images are sent through, they can be just grabbed by HTTP by anyone with a reasonable clue about such things. There are stacks of "mirror a website" type tools which will give them a stack of files to look through - not to mention the old standby of grabbing the image URL from the proxy logs.
The only way to make it more difficult is to embed them in a flash application that doesn't pull stuff through by HTTP but actually has them embedded in the SWF - that way, they're forced to print-screen if anything and only get screen resolution images.
Prairiemaiden wrote:
There is away to put a transparent gif over your photo and when they right click and save that is what they get the transparent gif.
Prairiemaiden
What I posted above does this. Flickr implements something like this as well, though I believe you have to explicitly turn it on.
Spencer, tinyeye is pretty rad. I think once they get most of the internet indexed, it'll be a tremendously useful tool.
Prairiemaiden wrote:
There is away to put a transparent gif over your photo and when they right click and save that is what they get the transparent gif.
Prairiemaiden
Flickr uses this system I believe, and it's quite effective. The whole process seems pretty complex though. I'll try to tinker with Ryan's method and see if I can maybe get it to work. Thanks for the tip.
Prairiemaiden wrote:
There is away to put a transparent gif over your photo and when they right click and save that is what they get the transparent gif.
As before though, this won't stop anyone with any dedication or experience. And remember, the people stealing your images spend their time nicking images, not taking photographs - they'll have some experience at it.
manyquestions wrote:
As before though, this won't stop anyone with any dedication or experience. And remember, the people stealing your images spend their time nicking images, not taking photographs - they'll have some experience at it.
It's like software piracy, stealing movies, music, and so on. As long as it is viewable by _someone_, it can be copied in some form. The reality is that simple precautions prevent most people from saving or otherwise printing the images. Those determined will always be able to steal and save it. You just have to not worry about those people.
The method I described can be done with basic javascript as well. I've uploaded a rough proof of concept, but note that it is not functional in IE without some help (as is nearly everything web-based). You'd need to use a Javascript library with better DOM control such as MooTools or Prototype to fully use this but it can be done.
Feel free to use the source code for any purpose. The images are ours and you may not use them. Nothing is guaranteed and no support provided and blah blah blah.
Marcus Watts wrote:
I'm more paranoid about budget photographers educating themselves from my work.
That will always happen to some degree and i have no problem with someone serious about trying to make a career from photography but all those who just want to make $200 on the weekend and keep their normal job are getting one awesome education via our blogs.
Don't worry about that part of it, though. One reason to blog is probably as
indirect advertising, but another reason to blog is to get your work
out there for people to see, right? So people will always learn from other people's
work. That's how things should be. If you somehow want to profit from that,
then one way is to make a video and sell it like Zack Arias is doing. The whole
culture of blogging is kind of predicated on the notion that you want to get your
thoughts and your work out there on your own terms, rather than hoping for / looking for
a publisher to do it for you. That will usually mean you are not profiting directly
from the blog.
If an image appears on a webpage, I can snag it. So can anyone else.
So all the protective measures are a waste of your time, or at worst, an annoyance to your viewer.
Also, it doesn't make sense to not have images up on a website, since how else do you advertise in this modern age?
The best thing to do is have your logo very visible.
This way, even if a client grabs the image and plasters it on Facebook or wherever, your name and brand appears.
Photographers that steal images for use on their own website will usually be more dissuaded by a logo than by images not having a logo.
