Practical Photography

Posting your images online is the best way to show off your portfolio and share your images, but how do you stop people from stealing these images?

It is very hard to stop people from using your images, once you have posted them online people can right click and save or copy image fro their own use, they can even print off some copies. Even if you protect your images and manage to disable that function people can still take a screen shot.

As I mentioned there are privacy options to prevent ‘all sizes’ which make it much harder to right-click-save an image. On social networking sites you may just want to keep your images for friends and family but this will not work if you are looking to use the internet to gain new business.

Unfortunately there are people out there who will steal your images I’ve found the best way to protect your images is by saving them for web with a smaller resolution, 72dpi is fine for web but you need around 300dpi for a good quality print. Also keep the image as small as possible.

Another trick I try to use is to put a watermark on the photo, if you put it right in the middle people can see it but it isn’t good enough to copy.

Unfortunately there is no sure fire way of protecting your images if you don’t want them stolen don’t put them online.