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| hil26 |
Flickrthis makes interesting readinghttp://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog...to-ended-up-on-sale-this-weekend/ |
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| jonH |
1) never upload large photos to flickr - 800px is more than big enough
2) go to your account, privacy settings. make sure the general public can't blog or download your photos. i have it set to contacts can do stuff but no-one else, and i make a habit of not automatically adding people as a contact if they add me flickr is useful -i've had licensing enquiries by two media companies in the US which is still ongoing - it's not just unscrupilous companies that can see the benefit of flickr and i won't be deleting my account just yet 
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| creators |
Thanks for this Dave, much appreciated. Just by the by, if I try to copy one of your pics it doesn't work, is that automatic if your setting are 'all right reserved'? | ||
| jonH |
no i think that's the download permissions thing | ||
| hil26 |
Keith I have my profile settings so that only I can download, if you ever want one, just let me know and I will send it on to you. As Jon said - I actually only ever upload images at medium jpeg resoltion, 72ppi and 600 on longest side. |
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| creators |
Thanks guys, duly amended, I have been more than a little naive in how I use flickr. I tend to forget there are an awful lot of completely unscrupulous, immoral people out there, or, least ways, don't think my pictures are good enough to rip off. And thanks for the offer to send pictures Dave, I tend not to download other peoples stuff, but do like to look at detail now and again. | ||
| the neepster |
I'm not sure what I've got my settings as but do tend to upload the smaller images these days... not sure anyone would want to nick one of mine anyway but I guess you never know.
I love flickr - can't see me giving it up anytime soon :D |
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| Evolution104 |
Hi guys.
I've been reading this with some interest. I've been working on creating my website, and hopefully building in protection for my pictures from copying. So I've done quite a bit of research on this. The web is HTML based. HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language. The emphasis on TEXT. For the most part, images are displayed by providing a link to the image file, which is then rendered by your browser. This saves the server from having to do this relatively lengthy process and improves performance. That link is plain text, unless obfuscated with a script or rendered directly from the server. Obfuscation can beat the average person, but anyone with a software background can easily figure out the link. Highly obfuscated code (i.e. usually with an external javascript file) is also frequently blocked by web browsers and antivirus programs because they can't tell if it might be a virus or trojan. In this case, your image won't be displayed at all. What Flickr does is use cascading style sheets or HTML style tags to overlay a transparent gif over the top of your image. So if you right-click on it, you'll be saving the transparent gif, not the image underneath. This is a very simplistic solution and there are several ways to get around this if you want to steal the image. It will also fail to work correctly on old browser versions which don't support the styles. One way is to look at the source code and simply copy and paste the link into your browser. As an example, I'll use one of jonh's images (sorry Jon). http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanhodd/2647372444/ If you right-click on the image and chose 'Save Picture As...', the name will appear as 'spaceball' and the type as gif. That's flickr's transparent overlay. But if you right-click somewhere on the page background and select 'View Source' from the menu, then search for 'spaceball', you will notice that just above it is the link to the actual photo: img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3055/2647372444_4fbaaa9258.jpg?v=0" Copy and paste http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3055/2647372444_4fbaaa9258.jpg?v=0 into your browser, and you have the image. An easier way to snag an image is to use Firefox. They give you all the tools to steal images. Open Firefox and again navigate to jonh's Flickr page. Then click on Tools > Page Info from the menu. Select the 'media' tab, then browse the list until you find the image (in this case, http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3055/2647372444_4fbaaa9258.jpg?v=0). Then click the 'Save As...' button. The bottom line is that it is nearly impossible to protect your images from downloading. The web is primarily a text-based medium, and there are many ways and many tools to allow anyone to access all the links. The only currently viable means of protecting images is to wrap them in an Adobe Flash object. Even then, a simple screen capture will get the low res image. It's taken me a while to come to terms with this. Basically, if you want to share your images on the web on a public (non-password protected) web site, your options for protecting your images from download are almost non-existent. Your only real options, if you're worried about this, is to post small, very low resolution images, and/or have a massive watermark across your image. But for photographers like us who want to share the beauty of the image itself, this is self-defeating. My website will be Flash based for this reason. Even with that, I am accepting of the fact that I cannot prevent a determined person from stealing my pictures. |
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| Evolution104 |
I was curious if I might be giving away secrets with my previous post.
Nah! This is the internet. I did a google search, and found even more interesting facts on how to get around Flickr's spaceball 
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=spaceball+flickr |
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| jonH |
funnily enough i had another image licensing enquiry last night (from yet another american tv channel  ) for the same image, except the link they'd given me to refer to the image in question was on someone's blog (with no credit to me as the photographer)
if you have images online, they're going to be nicked but what matters at the end of the day is loss of revenue. if my image hadn't been nicked by that particular blogger, i wouldn't have had the additional license enquiry. i've still asked for that person to remove the image because the cheeky sod had just taken without asking and the image is copyrighted (if they'd have asked first i would have said yes) that said, i am sorely tempted to add a watermark to the images on flickr just so credit is given where credit is due
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| hil26 |
very interesting indeed, and thanks for the insight. | ||
| creators |
Really useful information to know, thanks John, even if there is damn all we can do to stop theft.
It reminds me of years ago when I used to put a right click disable tag on my sisters cross stitch design web pages and came to realise that a screen capture was the easiest way round that. She gave up the site after about five years and averaging one or two sales a year. If we put up a freebie tempter, no matter how simple a design it was, it would attract thousands of downloads, but the rest of the site was ignored and the many hours we both put in to the designs a complete waste of time. |
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| Evolution104 |
Unfortunately, that's another one which doesn't work 
Right-click is javascript-based. All you need to do is disable javascript in your browser or firewall, and that code no longer runs. The only way around it is to have all the important content on your page load from javascript as well. Then if it's turned off, nothing important will even display on the page. Even then, the page source can still be viewed and the link copied, or use the Firefox method. Both still work since the user is not clicking on the image. On the other hand, I've looked at perhaps two or three hundred professional photographers' web sites while researching my web site design. The vast majority do little or nothing to prevent copying images from their sites. The very best photographers who do work for major accounts use Flash, or may not even display anything beyond a teaser (if their work is already well known, all they need is contact info). Since most don't bother, I kind of figure that I shouldn't be terribly concerned either, especially since my work is not that good. Now that I know I can do little, I'm accepting of that and sleep better at night not worrying about it 
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| Evolution104 |
Now that's a very interesting turn of events. How in the world did they know to contact you when they got the link from a blog which gave you no credit? |
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| creators |
Exactly the place I've got to. If I had actually taken a soul stopping winner of a picture, I wouldn't be putting it on flickr until after I'd milked it for all its worth and even then as a low res tease. Life is too short to lose sleep over the issue, if I got bothered I'd just stop putting pictures on the web. At the end of the day, web sites don't sell pictures in the main, compared to good old fashioned leg work and more deliberate forms of self promotion. Peoples attitude to the web is that, in general, it is a low cost medium and everything on it is fair game. No software business, if it wants to make any money from its products, puts that product on the web without the requirement of a registration code, and, of course, you can't put hardware on the web. Anyone involved in the arts, of any description, who is serious about trying to get an income from their work, would be better occupied in getting their work into real places, galleries, theatres and the like or approaching people and companies directly, than designing a web site show case in the hope of attracting customers. People do not generally simply lift a picture off the wall in art galleries and know that 'out there' if they want something they need to reach into their pocket first. |
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| jonH |
I can only assume they'd asked the blogger |
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