Photo theft
 

What do you recommend to prevent your photo's from being taken from the internet and used elseware? Thanks, Jimbo

I believe we are quite fortunate by the way this forum is structured. To view a large image any prospective thief must first register and enter details which are of course, recorded. There are two ways to protect your photos when sharing. Reduce the image size as most publications require 300dpi or close so an image shared on the Internet at 900px can only printed 3 inches wide. The second is to place a copyright marker or 'watermark' in a prominent place so if stolen it cannot be used. However watermarking can detract from the image but it is an effective way to protect your property. A happy-medium of compromise must be satisfied to allow people can enjoy your work as intended with protecting the photo from theft.

Photo theft
 

Thanks for the prompt reply.
Jimbo

Another way of doing it is to disable the 'right click' function so that the person cannot select 'Save Picture As'..... You'll find out how to this with a quick search on Google as i'm not sure what the HTML code is to do this.

.... But as with everything there are simple ways around it. e.g. 'Print Screen and then crop all the rubbish out.

Photo theft is becoming quite common, a number of online websites do it, and national newspapers aren't adverse to a bit of larceny either.

Are the anti-copyrighters to blame?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12..._and_copyright

I dont know whether what i do is right but as i own copyright on all my pic i really dont want other people taking credit for them. I change the image size to 72 pixel/inch and then make the longest side 400 pixels wide or high. That means that anyone copying them wont have the detail to enlarge them.

Anyway thats just my way i am sure there are others.

Karen

Karen; Very well done. You read my mind.

I always thought locks are to keep the gentleman away, Thieves will get in no mater what.

You said it best. That is one thing no one can defeat.
Keep the quality and size of picture at bare minimum, something that is not odd as is but gets very odd if one needs to print or enlarge it.

Hello, I had a few pics taken and altered by an animal rights activist.

Not flattering at all.

If they really want to get them, they will.

Even when it gets to the felony level, the govt will not do anything about it.

Now I am looking at a program to watermark my pics.

They can still steal them, but with a pices of the watermark missing, it is clear the pic has been altered.

I think you're on the right track.

Though I replied to this yesterday. Never mind. Recently found some of my photos on a site pulling images via an RSS feed to tart up their commercial pages. They're now blocked.

I think you should placed some liks in your photo or probably insert your name in it so it won't be placed anywhere of if they are published it would give some backlinks into your site as well.

Whilst I've started adding information into the EXIF data, I'm not as yet going to go to the hassle of attacking my photos with the ugly stick or watermarking as it is commonly called.

One thing I've found is that the referral logs tend to give a good indication of where people are looking at the images from. Some odd locations too:
http://unjobs.org/duty_stations/fran...ur-cher/photos

It's good fun when someone leeches your images from your own site. It's often happened to my photos on ebay adverts... i just upload a rude message in place of the original, with same filename' 'If this guys steals photos and bandwidth, would you really want to buy anything from him?' That sort of thing doesn't look too good in your ad ;)

Yeah you could do that with a flickr account until last year when they changed things so that if you replace an image it gets given a new URL. Something to do with server caching they say, but the change came at the same time that there was a user revolt over Yahoo using flickr content.

Most leeching of images from flickr is done via their API where sites pull off images based on keywords/tags, either by the searches or RSS feeds. Here is a typical example of 'tarting up your website':
http://www.viaouest.com/galerie1566.html

the size of the displayed images probably just puts it into the realms of 'fair-use'.

Actually this automatic pull from flickr is quite a dangerous thing for the website to be doing irrespective of any copyright issues, because they have no control over what gets tagged, they have no control over what they start displaying.

For the page in question one could tag anything with 'Laval' and it would appear on their page. Imagine some one posting a photo of their kid in the bath tagged with the name of some village. Additionally flickr allows people to post HC porn so long as it is filtered as such, but many people don't filter it properly so it is also likely to be appearing on these sites too. Not good.