protecting photos in smugmug
RLipp69
Registered Users Posts: 64 Big grins
hello i take alot of concert photos from sevral local bands.i want to start a smugmug acct.My question is can you prevent anyone from downloading your photos (right click save as) while they are looking at them.:dunno
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But - you should be aware that even with right click protection, the photo is loaded in the browser cache and can be grabbed from there.
If you're really concerned with theft, your best bet would be a professional account with right-click protection turned on, with watermarks applied (the originals aren't watermarked so you can still print a clean photo), and with display of your originals blocked.
--- Denise
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There are several possible levels of protection. You have to decide which is appropriate for your photos.
- You can prevent large sizes from being displayed on Smugmug in any way. This prevents people from getting your originals or images large enough to make high quality 8x10 or larger images. You can set this in your gallery customization. Pro accounts can block everything from L and up. The other account levels can block XL2, XL3 and original. The Medium, Large and XL sizes can still be borrowed for the purposes of posting elsewhere on the web, printing smaller sizes like 4x6, using as wallpaper, etc... But, blocking the larger sizes should certainly prevent anyone else from doing anything significantly commercial with your images since most of those uses would need higher resolution photos.
- With a pro-account, you can enable right-click protection. Technically, this puts up a transparent gif over the actual image such that when a browser user tries to do right click/save, what they get is first a warning dialog and then a useless transparent gif image. This is 100% effective with novice internet viewers and 0% effective for internet saavy users. With only a small amount of knowledge about either how browsers work or how Smugmug works, this is fairlyl simple to bypass. Whether this is useful or not depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
- Also with a pro-account, you can watermark your images. You can use either a standard Smugmug-supplied watermark or create your own custom watermark. The best looking, but also effective watermarks, are semi-transparent and extend across the important part of the image (so they can't be easily cropped out), but they are transparent enough that they don't visually ruin the image. These can be pretty effective because even if somebody takes the image from the web, it's still got the watermark in it. In Smugmug's system, the watermark is applied to all the generated sizes (not the thumbs), but is not applied to the original. That means that Smugmug can still use the original for digital download sales or for prints so you can have the watermark on the web, but not when someone buys something.
In my opinion, the best protection is to disable originals, create a custom semi-transparent watermark and decide for yourself if you want to turn right-click protection on. This lets you still offer your viewers good-sized images for viewing so they can really get a sense for the quality of your images (particularly on large screens), but doesn't let them get anything that they could make a decent sized print from.Homepage • Popular
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Maybe I'm being a freak about this, but ...
If I go to my gallery page and right click on my gallery thumbnail and "View Image" it will show me the -Ti (tiny) image used in that thumbnail in a separate window. If I change the -Ti at the end to an "M", "L", "XL", etc. it will access the larger images. I can then save those images as a .jpeg on my desktop, so people could still get at my images, even though I have all of the above mentioned security measures in place, other than the watermark. Is there a way to disable the ability to right click an image on my gallery page HERE and HERE and in the other corresponding category pages?? Just a thought ....
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Thanks, Andy, maybe something for the future then ...
BTW - Your support team ROCKS and are always right on top of things. I am very excited and proud of what I have been able to so easily create in such a short period of time with SmugMug with little to no knowledge of code. And the Support Heroes are always right there when you need an answer!
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Were you logged in at the time? If so I think you can always see all sizes of photos, I just tried doing what you did (on your gallery) and Smugmug gave me M size images for L and XL. I'm guessing that your gallery is set to allow M as the biggest size.