Stealing Your Photos - The Miracle Cure

First anything that you put on the Internet will be borrowed and stolen whether you want it or not. Right click scripts don't really help, copyright notices can easily be removed with Photoshop's content-aware fill, too big of a copyright notice and people won't even look at the photos. Flash doesn't really help, many people don't like flash (including me) and there are hundreds of programs that take your flash stream and extract the photos for you.

So what's the solution? It's actually a few steps.

1. Make the image large enough for people to see and experience the photo. The size? I often use between 600 and 800 pixels on the long side.
2. Put your copyright mark, not too small, not too big, just like the three bears.
3. Fill in your metadata, copyright, phone #…
4. Use the jpeg format.
5. And now the miracle potion. Set the quality to between 65% to 75%. The jpeg format is a “lossy”. This means that every time the jpeg photo is saved, the photo lose details. A jpeg photo saved once at 75% is much higher quality that the same photo saved 100 times at 75%.
6. Set the resolution to 72 dpi.

Facts

• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 50% quality makes an almost decent 4” by 6” print.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 50% quality makes a very poor 5” by 7” print.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 50% quality can't be printed at 8” by 10”.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 50% quality makes an almost decent web size image.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 50% quality can't be used for a publication.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 70% quality makes a ½ decent 5” by 7” print.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 70% quality makes a poor 8” by 10” print.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 70% quality makes an almost good web size image.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 70% quality can be used for a publication as a smaller size photo.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 95% quality makes a great web size image.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 95% quality makes an almost decent 8” by 10” print.
• An 800 pixels wide jpeg photo at 95% quality can be used for many publications.

50% jpeg image quality

70% jpeg image quality

95% jpeg image quality

Look at the differences, especially look at the inside of the ring.