Business Information

How to stop oth­ers from sell­ing your photographs

It is dis­con­cert­ing to open a stranger’s web page and come face to face with your own pho­tographs. It is even worse to see your work being sold by some­one else. There is no fool­proof way to pre­vent a deter­mined thief from copy­ing your pho­tographs from the web. How­ever, if you are a grand­par­ent who wants to share the grand kids’ pic­tures with friends and rel­a­tives, with­out spend­ing a for­tune, there are a few things you can do to pre­vent oth­ers from sell­ing your work.

First, make your pic­tures unat­trac­tive to thieves.

At Sketch­Pad, we use Pho­to­shop, but any photo-​editing soft­ware can do sim­i­lar things. When you look at your image size, you will see it described in 3 ways:

Pix­els. Tells you how many pix­els wide and high your photo will appear on the screen. The higher the num­bers the big­ger the photo will appear. For this exam­ple, I will be work­ing with a photo that we used on Face­book a short time ago. We set the pix­els to be 640 pix­els wide. The orig­i­nal photo was 4288 pix­els wide — way too large for Inter­net use! The wall pane in Face­book is 520 px, so my photo will dis­play a lit­tle larger than that. Here’s the photo at 640 pixels.

Next is the image size. You will see the width and height in inches (or other units of phys­i­cal mea­sure that you may have set). This tells you how wide the pho­to­graph will be when printed. You can print a pho­to­graph about 25% larger than this size. Larger than that, qual­ity goes down and looks ter­ri­ble. You can use this to your advan­tage in pro­tect­ing your images. The pic­ture above is 8.889 inches wide when printed. No one would ever need this photo larger than this. Com­pare the screen qual­ity with this one.

Can you tell that his one is only 2.133 inches when you print it? Enlarg­ing it to 3 inches looks too jagged to use.

The third set­ting is for res­o­lu­tion. Actu­ally you should set this one first for best results. Res­o­lu­tion is a mea­sure of how many dots you can shove together in a sin­gle line. For image 1 above that is only 72 dots per inch. That res­o­lu­tion is too low for high qual­ity print­ing but is fine for screen. In fact, you can reduce res­o­lu­tion way down to say 10 dpi. It still looks okay, but if you check the print size, it’s over 64 inches wide! I don’t believe any­one wants to mess with that.

The best dpi for print­ing is around 300 dpi. It gives sharp details and crisp col­ors. That is the dpi of photo 2. Yes, the lit­tle 2 inch photo. In other words, any of these pho­tos will be unat­trac­tive to any­one look­ing to print or sell your photographs.

Here’s another sur­prise. The orig­i­nal file size as the photo came off the cam­era was 3.08 megabytes. That would take for­ever to load and dis­play on a web­site! That’s why I haven’t shown you that one! The oth­ers file sizes are exactly the same — only 136 kb.

Which is the best method for siz­ing your Inter­net images?

Take your pick. All of these set­ting will make your pho­tographs use­less for print­ing. If a pho­to­graph doesn’t print well, it can’t sold which affords some pro­tec­tion from theft. Remem­ber to check your camera’s res­o­lu­tion. Use low res for the web and high res for print­ing work. Never upload your pho­tos straight into your web or social media site.

Tip:

If you didn’t get all this, make sure your web designer knows how to take care of it for you. It’s part of the job.

For more infor­ma­tion on this topic, sub­scribe to our site, or check back often for more meth­ods to keep your pho­tos safe.

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