Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Pro Business Discussion => Topic started by: tommm on April 19, 2013, 04:10:29 am
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Hi,
Not sure if this is the right forum but...
Just wondering what peoples current thinking is regarding preventing unwanted / unauthorised use of images from the web. Currently I limit file sizes of images I put on the web (website, Fickr, etc) to 1024 pixels on the long side and don't worry if people try and use it - as they're not going to be able to do anything beyond screen display with it. But with iPads and high resolution screens now having 2000+ pixels on the long side I'm thinking I'll have to increase my image sizes but worry that it's starting to get to the point where images will then be usable for print purpose (especially with some people recommending images of 4000 pixels for ipad use so they are zoom-able).
What do you do? What size images do you put on your websites, Flickr, Facebook, etc. And do you use watermarking as an alternative way of protection?
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Welcome to the digital world of thievery. With today's sophisticated up-res software and image manipulating tools no image is theft-proof. Especially if the end use is for web display. I've learned to accept the reality of unauthorized use as just another cost of doing business. Best if you design for the devices intended so that legitimate viewers can view your work without too much ugliness of agressive watermarking.
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If a photog uses a 23kb image, it will only print up a postage stamp! These are just rough guideines.
200kb yields a 4 x 6...just.
800kb for an 6 x 8
1.5mb for 8 x 10 print
I keep a guest portfolio of photogs I like. I Print up their work and write their name on the backs of the prints. I show it around when I get company that like photography, in addition to my own portfolio.
My own online work used to be 800 kb with a watermark. Now that I distribute to museums and rare book libraries, it is 200 kb and no watermark. I just name the file with my copyright info. My photos are 'kinda' iconic. Hard to mix up with other's work. So I am not very worried.
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Trust everybody, but brand your cattle.
My website is all watermarked and most postings to FB, etc. are both small, usually less than 750 pixels and marked with my copyright, name and website, especially sine FB strips out the metadata.
The key is small and to put my name on the front of the image.
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My approach is to not fret about it. As someone else has mentioned, there is no way to prevent image theft - you may deter it or reduce it, but that's all.
Plus, there is so much fantastic photography on the web for people to steal, why would they choose yours?
Finally, think of the time you might spend with anti-theft measures. Wouldn't that time be better spent in other pursuits?
Cheers!
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Nothing much you can do, as mentioned above, unless you make the photos small, low quality, and put a watermark in the middle of the photo, which doesn't help to display your work. However, I do watermark photos I post to social media sites such as Facebook, because of their terms of use, which say they claim the right to distribute the photos to third parties without compensation to, or notification of, the photographer. It is illegal to remove a copyright notice in the US at least. This will not necessarily stop thievery though.
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Thanks for the feedback and sorry for not responding sooner.
I wonder what's going to happen when screen resolution starts reaching 4000 or 6000 pixels on the long side, it's going to be tricky to display good looking images without being at risk of people having access to virtually original file quality....
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Thanks for the feedback and sorry for not responding sooner.
I wonder what's going to happen when screen resolution starts reaching 4000 or 6000 pixels on the long side, it's going to be tricky to display good looking images without being at risk of people having access to virtually original file quality....
I would imagine by that time a workable image protection scheme would emerge.
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A buddy of mine brought over an old CD of pictures of his kids, shot on film and scanned at Costco. The files are 4x6 inches at 300ppi, so 1200x1800 pixels. With a little work in Lightroom, I was able to make a decent 16x20 inch print on an Epson 3800 on lustre finish paper.
Yeah, I was surprised too. :)
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Cory Doctorow, a very successful author and anti-DRM activist, gives most of his work away. If you want to purchase it, fine. But it's also available free.
He maintains that, like photographers and authors, remaining unknown is a far greater barrier to success than piracy.
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^But not only have the people who steal my images been remiss about crediting me, they have in several cases credited my images to themselves, either specifically or by inference!
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Cory Doctorow, a very successful author and anti-DRM activist, gives most of his work away. If you want to purchase it, fine. But it's also available free.
He maintains that, like photographers and authors, remaining unknown is a far greater barrier to success than piracy.
So how does this "successful" author make a living by giving his work away?
If a student came to me with this strategy I would send him to a shrink.
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This "successful" author is well documented here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
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It really doesn't indicate how he makes his living, but he writes for magazines like Wired who do enforce their copyright. So maybe thats where he derives income. The people I know who are vocally behind similar philosophies make their living some other way than their photography. One is a trust funder who volunteers at non-profits-the other works in the oil industry.
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Most photographers I know freely give the use of images to various charities, schools, and other deserving causes. Where most of us get disturbed is when image use is taken (stolen) without asking. That's why I rarely search Google using key words from my best selling stock images. Just too many thieves to get worked up about. I also get thievery from my own web site from time to time that I know about let alone what I don't know about. You just have to accept internet piracy as a fact of life and get on with your creative life. I'm not one to cower in the corner doing nothing, fearful that I might get ripped off.
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My approach is to not fret about it. As someone else has mentioned, there is no way to prevent image theft - you may deter it or reduce it, but that's all.
Plus, there is so much fantastic photography on the web for people to steal, why would they choose yours?
Finally, think of the time you might spend with anti-theft measures. Wouldn't that time be better spent in other pursuits?
Cheers!
What a wonderfully pragmatic approach. I fully agree!
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I don't worry about this because I don't care if my image is spread around the web. Since it is always 72dpi, nowhere near a good print resolution, it can not be easily printed in high quality but only viewed on screens.
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I don't worry about this because I don't care if my image is spread around the web. Since it is always 72dpi, nowhere near a good print resolution, it can not be easily printed in high quality but only viewed on screens.
Hi,
72dpi is not what is important, it's the number of pixels that determines the potential for other uses than a monitor/display output.
Cheers,
Bart
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So how does this "successful" author make a living by giving his work away?
If a student came to me with this strategy I would send him to a shrink.
You are not seeing where the value lies, and probably shortchanging the kid.
One is not 'giving ... work away' by posting it on the world wide web.
As others have noted here, you simply cannot be worried about last generation's issues.
Ok, I came on to post an intro thread... :D
I'll go do that now.
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I've experimented with water marks and while I can post a much larger image - I now feel its pointless.
While my watermark protects it, the impact of the image is lost.
So, I've gone the route of smaller images without water marks.
I'm now in the range of 253KB - and think I will go a tad smaller (200KB)
Its a conundrum because yes, on one hand, who's to say anything I do will even be noticed let alone worthy of theft and my attempts to prevent that may make my offerings less attractive - but on the other hand, the more obscure your brand is, the easier it is to steal.
Photographers with high visibility are more likely to be notified of a fraud. So, its easy to say "who cares" or accept some shrinkage (freebies) when you are in the top quartile.
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+1 with PeterAit. Why would anyone bother stealing images on with your site, with the likes of Flickr, or a simple search on Google images? Most folks are looking to spruce up their personal pages, desktop, or iPhones. The only way to stop it is to not post the image to begin with.
I've worked in Advertising for over a decade. Anyone worth suing for real money due to copyright infringement already has a legal department and company policies in place to prevent it. Violating such rules will get you fired. Even when our sales-reps or outside employees pull those stunts for their work, we catch it, scold them and buy something from Corbis. It's easier, we find the right image and in the correct resolution that fits the job, (or they had me shoot it).
From a technical standpoint, I still use 250px images due to faster page loads, and can have everything of a given subject in one screen for the over-caffeinated ADHD viewer too see in twenty seconds or less. I only know this because as a buyer I would never put up with slow pages and massive images. Even with today's bandwidth.
-Keep Shooting
You make good points - main one being the people that can be sued for damages are in corporations. These are not the people I worry about.
Damage to reputation comes in many forms - and as another posted, I 've met one other artist who found their images on another website - with another person claiming they were there's.
Anyway its perhaps something we cannot ever control and just like the music business (free downloads and distribution), its a cost of doing business.
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Image size has little to do with illegal web use. Just a bit of decent up-resing will do for most web thievery. Thefts for printing images are more difficult with small sizes but can still be done. I was so dismayed with the illegal use (and crappy post processing) of one of my images as a CD cover I offered to edit my own image decently for their use for $20. I guess that was too steep a price because they ignored my offer. (East European country-so not much recourse there.) So my only consolation is having a mildly amusing theft story.
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Image size has little to do with illegal web use. Just a bit of decent up-resing will do for most web thievery. Thefts for printing images are more difficult with small sizes but can still be done. I was so dismayed with the illegal use (and crappy post processing) of one of my images as a CD cover I offered to edit my own image decently for their use for $20. I guess that was too steep a price because they ignored my offer. (East European country-so not much recourse there.) So my only consolation is having a mildly amusing theft story.
I recently visited a framing shop, and they also had some framed prints for sale. The had a series of canvases with images of different rocks on a beach, that had some weird processing to them... until I realized the "processing" I was seeing was just the result of up-resizing a highly compressed JPEG file; I guess they where selling oversized thumbnails.
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Some frame shops handle prints for artists who may be responsible for the sub-quality printing. Lots of that going around nowadays. Or maybe it was a poor attempt to have something artsy-fartsy different.
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Real simple. If you don't want it stolen, the correct size is 0. Period.
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I just did a little up-resolution test with Lightroom. I picked a Flickr picture (not mine in case my registration affected how easy it was to "borrow" something). The picture had no copyright or watermark on it. The picture was of a dragonfly with max dimension of 440 pixels. I resized it to an 8x10" at 360ppi. At that amount of resizing (8.2X), the resulting image was noticeably soft and not something i would want to print.
So i went back to the same Flickr site and noticed that I could click on an enlarged size that provided a 1064 pixel max dimension. I borrowed that image and resized it to an 8x10 at 360ppi. Resized the maximum dimension was 3600 pixels or 3.6X the original size. The resulting image at was clear and sharp and suitable for printing. (To complete the test, i deleted the two image sizes i had borrowed :-))
I have one of those "proof" watermarks all the way across my website images and its way ugly. I think the way i'll go is to limit the size of the shown images to 500 or less pixels and perhaps put a small watermark in the corner.
Yes, i know, watermarks can often be removed with a little work, but all i have to do is make it more difficult than the majority of flickr accounts, and thieves will tend to go there instead :-)
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I had a 72 ppi resolution image, probably around 300k jpg, 960 pixels on the long side horizontal, cropped vertical and then used for a full page magazine ad. Their ad guy had found it online and said "if it's on the internet it is fair game". The company came to realize the error of their ways and did settle with me... quickly. But it just goes to show you that nothing really useful online is really safe.
And yes it had my logo on it but when they cropped it, logo gone. And more amazing was that it is was originally from a medium size roll scan from a 35mm negative of one stop pushed Tri-X. Great photo though.
I have now found that it has been copied again, but horizontal this time, and printed at maybe 4 or 5 feet wide and hanging in a gym in Serbia.
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I had a 72 ppi resolution image, probably around 300k jpg, 960 pixels on the long side horizontal, cropped vertical and then used for a full page magazine ad. Their ad guy had found it online and said "if it's on the internet it is fair game". The company came to realize the error of their ways and did settle with me... quickly. But it just goes to show you that nothing really useful online is really safe.
And yes it had my logo on it but when they cropped it, logo gone. And more amazing was that it is was originally from a medium size roll scan from a 35mm negative of one stop pushed Tri-X. Great photo though.
I have now found that it has been copied again, but horizontal this time, and printed at maybe 4 or 5 feet wide and hanging in a gym in Serbia.
Maybe getting ripped off is a form of fame? Without the royalties.
;-)
Rob C