Helping a friend get his mind around image security

rutt

I have a friend who is new to smugmug, coming from an all flash site, and who has some concerns about protecting his images. I thought I'd share some of my discussion with him. Perhaps it will help someone else.

First a little security 101. Here is an inconvenient truth. You cannot both show an image and protect from being "taken". It just cannot be done.

Suppose you show an image in a browser. Someone can do a screen capture (grab on a mac) and crop the image out. Suppose your image is in a book. Someone can scan it. In a gallery show? Someone can sneak in a camera and take a picture of it. If it can be seen, it can be copied.

So? Get over it.

What can you really do?

1. Limit the size of image you allow to be shown. SM makes this particularly easy and convenient by allowing you to upload full sized images for printing or sharing with special people with passwords, while at the same time providing tight fool proof protection for versions over a given size. In effect, this is the solution the most professional image publishers use. For example, see Magnum or The New York Times.
2. Watermark your images so that you can assert your rights if they are stolen. Again SM makes this convenient. It provides a watermarking facility which will mark the images when they are shown but not when they are printed. Actually this works by watermarking everything but the originals, which is what is used for printing.

Repeat after me. If I show it, I have shared it. And someone can capture it somehow.

jfriend

The other things you can do are:

• Password protect the gallery and only share the password with people you want to see the images and trust. This limits the scope of who could steal it.
• Make the gallery unlisted and only share the link to the gallery with people you want to see the images and trust. This limits the scope of who could steal it.
• Right-click protect the gallery, but this is a mild deterrent only. To someone who knows how to circumvent it, it takes only 10 seconds to defeat or even less time to grab a screen shot. I have nothing against using it as a deterrent, but it is not real protection.

I'm repeating what you said: If I show it, I have shared it. And someone can capture it somehow.