Hey folks long time no see. I am sorry to say I havent been dedicateing much time to shooting, but rather putting together my portfolio, some of which I have posted here in our gallery. Here is what my question is in a long drawn out sort of way.

I am wanting to build a website that will allow me to have my images able to be displayed in such a manner where anyone can see them however I want to make sure that it is impossible to steal them or near as impossible as possible. I have seen a couple of photographers websites over the years some of which I had to say had the exact thing I was looking for but no way of finding out the code used to do it. I dont know if there is a software bundle out there that would build a gallery which I can just drag and drop into it, secure it for me, so that I can publish it on the internet without worry or concern my work is bing used without my permission or knowledge.

Any solutions? Thanks

American PhotosCDM Photography

Chris

Hi Chris,

To be honest, any code-related protection can be outdone. For example, lets say you used a Flash gallery software with no way of right clicking on the picture and saving it. Still, one could take a screen shot of their browser window (hitting PrntScrn in Windows) and then pasting that into Photoshop and cropping out everything but the picture.

Really the only way that I can see that would solve anything is to watermark the crap out of it.That's still not 100% foolproof, but most thieves won't be willing to take the amount of time needed to get rid of the watermarks.

I'm just barely an amateur photographer, but I've worked professionally for over 10 years in the ISP business. I've had a few customers ask this very question. To be honest, if you want to be 100% safe, the only thing you can do is not post them. Other than that the only advice I can give is present them via Flash (or some other way that prevents right clicking and saving) and watermark them.

I know, it really sucks to have to worry about art thieves!!

-Melen

"To be honest, if you want to be 100% safe, the only thing you can do is not post them."

Absolutely true!!!  I have on several occasions suggested to Renderosity that they implement some form of watermarking to make image theft a bit more difficult....so far, it hasn't met with positive response around here.  In the mean time, Rendo is like a freebie shopping mart for image thieves!!!.

So, really you only have a few options;

1)Watermark anything you post.

2)Post very small versions of your images.

3)Don't post anything.

Having had some of my images stolen already....I now post less, post smaller....and anything that really may be worth selling doesn't get posted here.

I can only ditto what has been said. I came across a site recently that did not allow me to save any of it's images. I would try, and just get a 1x1pixel gif. I'm not sure how they did it but thought it was rather neat. Still, I could have just taken a screen shot and gotten it that way.