Afraid of people steeling iamges?

[Rosl Roessner]

Hi,
I've got an email from a man who told me, that he loves my image galeries on my homepage, but he would not present the pictures in such a high resolution ( I use to show them 800 pix wide), because he would be afraid that other people download them and use them as their own. :(
By now, I did not use a signature.
What do you think about that?

[Roger Clark]

Rosl,
Yes, people steal images all the time. But so what? If they put them on their desktop as wallpaper or something, it doesn't do any real harm unless they sell it or use it on their web site to promote their site. People also link to the jpeg images in the source code of their web page, so while it appears on their web page, the code is getting the image form your web site. They seem to consider it not stealing. If you have a copyright on your image along with your web site, such practices can actually drive traffic to your site. I get well over 1 million hits per month to my site, some of which is people discussing and linking to the site from forums, blogs, and personal web pages.

I have images stolen all the time. Usually it's someone who doesn't know enough to remove/crop/cover the copyright and someone alerts me to their use (happens about once a month). Most recent was a site called http://cuteanimalpics.blogspot.com where someone alerted me to the person copying an image of mine.
I challenged the person and her response was "If its on the web it is free to copy." I investigated the site and found she had images from Walt Disney and National Geographic, so I alerted them (Nat Geo was not easy), and alerted google, to ISP. The site is now down (that was 3 weeks ago).

I have also had others enter my images in photo contests, and in one case with my copyright still on it!
People in the contest alerted me and the image was pulled.

Of course there are probably others who have stolen images, changed the file name, and erased the copyright.
I'll probably never find out about those.

But I have the original really high resolution images, and that is what matters.

Roger
web site: http://www.clarkvision.com

[Fabs Forns]

You can go to TinEye, they are still in Beta, but it's an image search engine that will find your images in the web:

http://birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=14089

If you don't show your stuff on the web, your exposure would be minimal, so it's worth taking the risk.
Always use your copyright on them though...

[Dan Brown]

I have notice that some photographers have disabled the windows "right click" function on their websites. This stops people from saving the image for use on their wallpaper etc. How does one do this? and is there a down side? Dan Brown

[Roger Clark]

I have notice that some photographers have disabled the windows "right click" function on their websites. This stops people from saving the image for use on their wallpaper etc. How does one do this? and is there a down side? Dan Brown

Dan,
All that does is stop the uninformed. All you need to do is do a screen capture, open photoshop, paste, crop the image, and save.

Roger

[Dan Brown]

I see! ( I once was one of the uninformed!) Thank you Roger. Dan

[Roger Clark]

And I was too!
Roger