Recommended 'safe' size for posted photos

HKAussie

with legislation (soon to be) in place that makes it easy for any person or corporation to use our photos (especially photographers based outside of the U.S.A.) without reimbursement, the logical thing to do would seem to be to limit the size of the photos we display on the web.

with that in mind, what maximum sizes have most of you settled on in your galleries? 750x510? 480x340? ('fit within' sizes allowing for portraits as well as landscapes in 3:2 aspect ratio)

cheers,
Gregory

rainforest1155

Hi,

Welcome to Dgrin!

That sounds like a strange and annoying legislation. Do you have any more information and links on this?

Limiting the display size is not the only thing you can do against unwanted use of your photos. You could consider adding a clever watermark to embed your name or copyright into the photo. So whoever uses your photos, would be showing off your name as well and I'm not sure that would be something they would likely to do or it wouldn't be a necessarily bad thing for you.

Watermarks may not impossible to remove, but it would need extensive work and most likely results in quality loss.

More details on watermarks are here:
http://www.smugmug.com/help/custom-watermark-protection

Sebastian

denisegoldberg

rainforest1155 wrote:

That sounds like a strange and annoying legislation. Do you have any more information and links on this?

There are a few threads on the (proposed at the time) legislation in the Wide Angle forum - http://www.dgrin.com/search.php?searchid=1204800.

--- Denise

HKAussie

hello Sebastian.

rainforest1155 wrote:

You could consider adding a clever watermark to embed your name or copyright into the photo

watermarks are usually one of the more popular answers to piracy and theft, but as in the physical world, the serious thief will also always know how to get around the locks.

my problem with watermarks though is that they'll only truly be effective if they're obtrusive. when I'm showing my photos to the world, that's a deal breaker. (because I'm not a professional photographer, I have to work harder than others to make my photos look good ;-)

but since the serious thief can't be stopped, a non-obtrusive informative watermark in an image not larger than 1000x810 (which is btw large enough to print a mighty nice photo up to 4" long) might be the way to go. smaller than 1000 would be ok as long as it's larger than 800 or SmugMug won't display the watermarked version.

which brings me to SmugMug's watermark system. at first, I thought it would be great to use SmugMug's watermark system because I assumed that I could apply edge-specific watermarks to those images that needed them, but I've read the help section regarding watermarks (the section that Sebastian referred me to) and could not see any mention of aligning the watermark to any edge, and the watermarks in all of the sample images are centred. whoops! not good. mmm... now I'll have to think about it for a while.

cheers,
Gregory

denisegoldberg

HKAussie wrote:

which brings me to SmugMug's watermark system. at first, I thought it would be great to use SmugMug's watermark system because I assumed that I could apply edge-specific watermarks to those images that needed them, but I've read the help section regarding watermarks (the section that Sebastian referred me to) and could not see any mention of aligning the watermark to any edge, and the watermarks in all of the sample images are centred. whoops! not good. mmm... now I'll have to think about it for a while.

You can definitely apply watermarks to the edge. I'm using SmugMug's watermark system, and when you set an image as a watermark you also specify where it is to be applied. Take a look at the photos on my site - the watermark is in the corner.

And yes, I'm well aware that it can be cropped. But I won't even bother to look at galleries with watermarks splashed across the photo, so I can't do that to my own photos.

--- Denise

HKAussie

hi Denise.

denisegoldberg wrote:

But I won't even bother to look at galleries with watermarks splashed across the photo, so I can't do that to my own photos.

ditto!

thanks for the headsup regarding edge alignment. that's great. now to create a watermark or two...

cheers,
Gregory

Sheaf

Another idea is to do a very faint watermark all across the photo, but a more visible one on the edge.

One of my favorites: http://www.downriverphotography.com/gallery/5007968_CZArX#300410327_p2KU7-A-LB