Theft, misuses and potential loses are valid concerns as more 
photographer move their work online. For many of us, sales of images involves displaying them online thru portfolios or galleries. Therefore, we must use some measure of security to protect our valuable assets.
Whether your focus is in preventing others from stealing your images to make prints, or making sure that clients do not re-post their proofs in popular social gathering sites like MySpace or Facebook, the following information will help you to deal effectively with this.
- Use common Sense
One misconception is that theft and misuse of images will go away with enough security. As a web developer I often remind my clients that there is not such thing as perfect security online environment.
Take an scenario, let say you are uploading 100 KB images to a gallery for proofing, then it does not make sense to protect them as though because it is not good enough to make a professional or fine art print.
Be aware that not all online proofing services are doing a good job protecting your images. Always is a better approach if you host your images where you can control the size of them when are published online. - Use “Stop them” approach
As I said, all security will not be enough. The rule of the game is to place measurement that will scare off the casual theft. For example; - Watermarks – The use of watermarks have proof to be effective on the Web.
- JavaScripts – Javascript provide an easy way to modify the functionality that must people use to download images from the web. See an example at the Puerto Rico image portfolio of Alicea’s Photo Gallery. It can be used to disable the mouse right-click and the save as of your browser.
- Flash Payers – The widespread use of Flash for photography websites make it a respectable consideration for addressing the security needs of your images. It does the same to the browser than javascripts but with a higher level of security. The advantages of flash is that extracting the images is a more complex process and it does not download the images to the cache of the browser. See an example at Alicea’s Photo Gallery .
I would like to know your opinion about it…
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