iPhone steals photos

Wiren · October 20, 2009

My son tells me today that his friends can use an iPhone to view my site (all photo's are right click protected) and once they are at the shot they like, they hold it there for a few seconds and the device asks if they want to save the photo - say yes and it is yours, scott free.....:dunno what the hell is up with that?

This little trick is not a good way to make sales. I know that the resolution may not be good for prints - but being the digital age where most people use photo's on Facebook and their iPhone's anyway, this kind of sucks.

Is there any way to prevent this? The photo's taken from me were of my son's High School soccer team and the kiddo stole the pics I took of him, so I am not so worried about that - but if a kid clues in an adult, this could spread and be a way for a lot of us to lose some sales.

Is anybody aware of this, am I late for the game....? :scratch

Thanks

Lee

run_kmc · October 20, 2009

The best way to prevent that is with an obtrusive watermark. That's actually a fairly roundabout way to get images that are "right click protected". People can always do a screen capture while your photo is up, or look through their browsers cache if they really want it.

Disabling right clicks only prevents the lazy route. A screen capture really isn't that much more effort.

Wiren · October 20, 2009

paper thin security
I am no PC programming guru and imagine it to be difficult to write code for. But I would imagine if you could take away the lazy route, you could do something for the not so lazy route also. Thieves will find a way, it would be nice to see it be harder for them though, like making screen saves come up blank or something, but like I said, what do I know

For now, I have taken down all the shots with the kiddo and won't post anymore of him, he's gotten all the freebies of himself he will get, I only hope that he won't help other team mates procure their own in this fashion.

Wiren · October 20, 2009

Just read this thread; http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=65662 about copying a screen save, that sucks, I hate watermarks, but......

thaKing · October 20, 2009

honestly, if it's on the web, it can be had...there's really no way to prevent it...as mentioned, there's the cache, sometimes you can bypass right-click, etc...even embedding images in a flash movie can be reverse-engineered to the individual pieces...

right-click and other forms of protection are there to keep an honest person honest...a thief is gonna find a way, no matter what...

Andy · October 20, 2009

Wiren, right click protection is really not much, ... anyone can bypass it and the photos are actually in the visitor's browser cache.

Watermark your photos. Block the large sizes if you wish. And right click. That's the trio of protection.

Wiren · October 20, 2009

Thanks Andy. As I stated, I read a lot of the issue in that previous thread I quoted in my last message. I do limit the file size to medium and right click protect the photo's. I really hate to watermark, but I guess I should, seeing how I will never really know if the problem becomes bigger unless somebody opens their mouth about it. I guess I was lucky my son told me about his buddy bragging how he gets the shots for free.

For now, I have taken down all of the photo's of the said culpret and will post no more shots of him, just a little way to make a statement. What really drives me nuts is my wife insisting that it is no big deal and that the principle of the matter is of no consequence - then again, she does nothing with photography and has no clue to the cost in time and hosting, etc. , let alone the the reason for the principle of the issue.

Now I will go and spend more time reloading watermarked photo's. I was thinking of lowering my prices on other higher priced work like my landscapes and such - this just makes me stick to my prices all the more, not like I have ever really sold too much anyway and now I feel my prices will ensure I get some recoupment for the time I am spending doing some "triple protection" from dishonest folks!:puke1

Thanks for your response - lesson learned for me, better in this small way than an expensive one I guess.

Lee

thaKing · October 20, 2009

watermarking is actually easy...create one file for the watermark and SM does all the marking...plus, it is only on the web images - the prints won't have the watermark included on them...

jfriend · October 20, 2009

Wiren wrote:

Now I will go and spend more time reloading watermarked photo's. I was thinking of lowering my prices on other higher priced work like my landscapes and such - this just makes me stick to my prices all the more, not like I have ever really sold too much anyway and now I feel my prices will ensure I get some recoupment for the time I am spending doing some "triple protection" from dishonest folks!

There is no need to reload your photos to get them watermarked. And, if you are selling prints, you do NOT want to upload watermarked images. What you want to do is to use Smugmug's watermark facility which can be applied to images you already have on your site without reuploading. By letting Smugmug do the watermarking, they keep the watermark off your original so it won't show in prints that people order.

duds · October 20, 2009

Also, don't forget that watermarking is free advertising! Everytime someone sees a picture with your name or logo as a watermark, that's free advertising for you.

beetle8 · October 20, 2009

I use a transparent WM now that is not an image killer but is Very aparent. The result is that I have lots of people using my images as FB profile pics. I'm OK with that, I wish there was a way to install HTML into the image so that whenever it was clicked it would bring people to my site.

David Manning · October 22, 2009

I showed up to photograph a wedding a few weeks ago, and the guestbook was full of images from the couple's engagement session! I commented on the beautiful guestbook, and the bride said she had done screen grabs from their SM gallery! The book truly looked great thanks to the high res images I allowed her to view in her gallery. I wasn't too mad, because she had purchased a high res disc of the images, but I hadn't delivered them yet. I was shocked at how good the book looked, and they did give me photo credit in the book. Overall, it wasn't a really big deal, but I learned a lesson. Watermark!

tatteberry · October 27, 2009

Doing business online is a lot like in a brick and mortar shop. You just have to build the cost of stolen merchandise into your prices. Besides, I doubt that the people who make prints from your Smugmug galleries would typically buy prints, so you're probably not losing a sale there. I try to make my profits on the session and keep my prints prices low enough that people find it just as easy to order as to print them themselves. I use right click protect, don't let them download the largest files, but hate the way watermarks look. They're distracting from the image, and that makes it hard to make a sale.

brjphoto · October 27, 2009

You know how the saying goes (and I'm paraphrasing here):

If you don't want your pictures to be stolen, don't put them on the internet. Period.

Otherwise, you just have to do the things that others suggested. The more paranoid you are about stolen files, the larger and more annoying your watermark should be. That's pretty much the bottom line.

Wiren wrote:

Is there any way to prevent this? The photo's taken from me were of my son's High School soccer team and the kiddo stole the pics I took of him, so I am not so worried about that - but if a kid clues in an adult, this could spread and be a way for a lot of us to lose some sales.

Is anybody aware of this, am I late for the game....?

Thanks

Lee

iPhone steals photos

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