Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Pro Business Discussion => Topic started by: fotagf8 on January 29, 2014, 02:41:27 pm
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I am creating a site to sell my photographs from. The .photo, .photography domains are interesting from a branding standpoint. However, if I were in the business of stealing photographs from the web, I think I would concentrate my efforts on those domains rather than .com because obviously someone who uses the more specialized domain is more likely to be selling photos, or at least posting images.
Is this a legitimate concern, or are thieves just not that discriminating. Yes, I know that if you don't want images stolen, don't post them online. I am willing to take the risk given other precautions I am taking (watermarking and copyright registration), but there is no reason to put your head in the lion's mouth.
Thanks
Jack Siegel
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Your head goes in the lion's mouth as soon as you post .jpgs and .pngs etc. Those things attract thieves like flies. You don't need a .photo domain to do that.
In some cases you can at least complicate direct access to your image files with Flash and a few other schemes. But even then it is trivial to grab any image as displayed on the screen, using perfectly legal software that comes with the most popular operating systems.
I was curious about how I might safely place rather large images on the net, so I played the thief. Even with my very limited and rusty knowledge of html, I was able to download jpegs from all the photo sites I tried within a few minutes, in the highest resolutions stored on those sites which was often higher than the highest resolution that could be displayed through the site itself. Most of the popular sites were organized in a way where several dozen images could be downloaded at once with a few clicks. The "right click protection" on those sites is a joke, a kind of placebo for the gullible. And certain popular browsers have features that positively invite the theft of images.
Your only real defense is limited file sizes, and ragged edge minimum image quality. I suppose watermarks are effective as well, but at a terrible aesthetic cost.
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I think you will find that Google image search is the way that they will find photographs.
Cheers,
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I think you will find that Google image search is the way that they will find photographs.
Cheers,
+1
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Regardless of anything else I'd rather stick with a .co.uk, simply because its geographical and thats where most of my clients are.
and besides .photo doesn't sound like a professional name to me. Businesses always have the .co.uk's, .com's, occasionally a .net
All the others are rarely used by genuine companies.
Paul.
www.photographybyriddell.co.uk
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Just got my .photography which due to my common as muck name might come in handy as myname.co.uk/com are long gone and there are 3-4 other photographers with my name (though thankfully they are not in advertising)
I disagree with the .photo not sounding proffesional as it hasn't stopped me from working on award winning ad campaigns, art buyers look at the work not the domain name ending.