Thanks for that Business Sense thing

[Jim Bryant]

Originally Posted by danbaileyphoto

Nick, sounds like you've really gotten good use out of these forums and learned alot! When the time comes down the road, you'll be in a position to offer advice to up and coming photographers like you are now.

Re: Watermarks and EXIF. No, they don't protect your work, which is why I always accompany my digital images with an armed thug who beats the snot out of anyone who steals them.

Hahahaha..I use Benny as well to deliver my images too.

[SusanH1970]

Originally Posted by danbaileyphoto

Re: Watermarks and EXIF. No, they don't protect your work, which is why I always accompany my digital images with an armed thug who beats the snot out of anyone who steals them.

That cracked me up!

[Biomech]

Originally Posted by Mike367

Would you please elaborate on this? You've lost me.

Firstly, the EXIF and anti-theft ideas aren't worthless as Jim Poor points out - if he really thought this he wouldn't add his name to the copyright on his website images. As someone earlier pointed out, if someone WANTS your picture - they will get it. What we can do is help keep away the little kiddies and make this harder for people. Infact by combining a number of web based techniques we can make it very difficult for people to steal pictures. (Lower resolution, shrink wrapped and htaccess modifications for example).

You can think of Shrink Wrapping like taking your print and putting a piece of glass over the top. You can still see your picture but if anyone tries to act on it (draw on it or in this case right click), they will only be working on the piece of glass.

Assuming you don't know much about webdesign - Websites are made of blocks of code (elements) which you can style. So you can have the "paragraph" code and change how the text looks, the size, colour etc. as well as setting a background colour or picture that sits behind the text. What shrink wrapping does is set you photo as the background image and then instead of text over the front, you use a clear/transparent picture.

If I get a chance this week, I'll run some tests and right some code and make an article of it.

[Jim Poor]

Originally Posted by Biomech

Firstly, the EXIF and anti-theft ideas aren't worthless as Jim Poor points out - if he really thought this he wouldn't add his name to the copyright on his website images. As someone earlier pointed out, if someone WANTS your picture - they will get it. What we can do is help keep away the little kiddies and make this harder for people. Infact by combining a number of web based techniques we can make it very difficult for people to steal pictures. (Lower resolution, shrink wrapped and htaccess modifications for example).

You can think of Shrink Wrapping like taking your print and putting a piece of glass over the top. You can still see your picture but if anyone tries to act on it (draw on it or in this case right click), they will only be working on the piece of glass.

Assuming you don't know much about webdesign - Websites are made of blocks of code (elements) which you can style. So you can have the "paragraph" code and change how the text looks, the size, colour etc. as well as setting a background colour or picture that sits behind the text. What shrink wrapping does is set you photo as the background image and then instead of text over the front, you use a clear/transparent picture.

If I get a chance this week, I'll run some tests and right some code and make an article of it.

I didn't say anti-theft measures are all worthless. "Shrink-wrapping," however is. It takes time for those blank gifs to load which wastes bandwidth (granted, not much) and more importantly slows your site down.

It won't stop the educated crooks because they know how to get around it. It won't stop Joe Snuffy the uneducated thief either, because they know enough to not use right click and will employ screen capture which is not affected at all by a clear gif. So, to stop the right-clickers, it's easier to just disable right click rather than go through the headache of shrink wrapping the images. It's a worthless tool.

I have several defenses in multiple layers, and yet people still manage to steal photos now and then. Of course, they have to work for it, which shows "willful infringement" should it come to a court case.

BTW, I just got paid for an infringement case, so I'm sort of up to date on all this.

[nickbedford]

Shrink wrapping merely requires knowledge of HTML and/or the use of a DOM traversing plugin in your browser. Many browsers these days have one (Chrome, IE8, Safari). Flickr is an example of shrink wrapping that's easy as pie to overcome.

I must admit that watermarking is really more of a marketing thing than an attempt to thwart image theft (as it's been stated that it's really not that hard to just crop out watermarks and/or use HTML knowledge to get it).