Chez Spud

Apologies, this question has been lurking for a while. Amanda asked a while back about how we can protect our images online, to prevent others using them.

In short, there is no truly effective way of preventing someone who is very skilled and determined helping themselves to your images. So the basic rule is ‘if in doubt, leave it out’. If you’re anxious about your images being taken, for whatever reason, then don’t post them online.

Some basic precautions are to make use of any security options available to you. For example, on Flickr, you can change your account settings so that no one can download your images, no one can blog your images, only small sizes of your images are available for view. You can change the copyright options so that your images are protected under copyright law, rather than the Flickr ‘creative commons’ license option which allows anyone to use your images as long as they are appropriately credited. You can even prevent people blogging your images (gasp!).

If you’re very whizzy and hosting your own site you could fiddle with the javascript to prevent ‘right clicking’ on your images so they can’t be downloaded. But then there are ways around that too apparently. I won’t pretend to understand it! Perhaps you can do this on non self-hosted sites? Who knows? It’s worth bearing in mind that you can’t stop people doing a screen grab of any image, and then ‘cutting it out’ and manipulating it using Photoshop or other such package.

You could also add a watermark to your images, something which clearly identifies the image as belonging to you and which, in theory, deters others from circumventing your efforts to make your images downloadable. But a very evil robber may attempt to work around a watermark in Photoshop or some such. It’s not foolproof alas.

Finally you could upload low resolution versions of your photos so that they don’t print well, should anyone manage to download the image. Personally this doesn’t work for me as I print my photos via Flickr and thus like them to be high resolution for printing purposes.

I guess the question to ask yourself is ‘Why am I concerned about my images being stolen?’ and that will help you decide whether to post your images online at all, or which ones you are happy to put up. If you make money from your photos then the risk of your images being stolen is a serious commercial issue. Otherwise, whilst very irritating to have your work snitched, I guess you have to decide whether you can live with it. If you’re worried about images of your children being available to the masses, then my advice would be not to put them on the internet in the first place. The last issue is a difficult one and I’ve been back and forth about making photos of the Megaboys publicly available. I can’t really offer any thoughts though as I think it’s a very personal choice.

What have I missed? What other ways can we protect our photos? In the end I guess it’s finding a middle ground that you’re comfortable with…we want to share our photos with friends and family, bring our blogs to life with lovely images, but there is always the risk of skulduggery lurking in the shadows.

QuickTip!

When you’re taking a picture of someone, get in close…closer…yes, closer…get in SO close that their face fills in the frame. Sometimes it’s great to have a portrait with ‘space’ around it, to put the person in context. But sometimes that can be rather distracting, especially if the background is pretty busy. So get in close and then snap!

Also, when you’re shooting from the side as in the above portrait…focus on the eye nearest you. Your eye is naturally drawn to the part of the face that is nearer, you, the viewer…so that’s the bit you want in focus.

Question – I need your feedback people!

Lots of you have asked for tips on photographing children, and I’m delighted to say I’ve got the lovely Nadia Swindell to guest blog on this topic in a couple of weeks. She’s planning a first post on general tips for getting good portraits of children, but wants to know if a follow up post on basic Photoshop tips for processing portraits would be helpful? What do you think? I would LOVE to read her tips, but I don’t want to ask her to do two posts unless there is a real enthusiasm for basic Photoshop help? Let me know.

In the meantime please do take a look at her site, her portrait work is absolutely stunning. I’m SO thrilled she’s agreed to guest blog!

Part 6 of CCC was posted yesterday, a mahoooooooosive post about reducing camera shake and blurry photos. Catch up here if you missed it. And don’t do it again, OK? xx

If you liked that, you might like this ...

• Camera Club: Backing Up
• Camera Club: Special Edition…what I learnt this week
• Camera Club…roll up for a Photo-A-Day project in 2010
• Camera Club…RAW v JPEG
• Camera Club: Uncle Bob Blues or How to be the Perfect Wedding Guest