It’s a risk every photographer and visual artist takes by placing their work online. There is no way to protect people from taking and using these images. If you put a right-click block on, use flash or one of the many other ways we think we are thwarting people from stealing our images, there is a way around it. Simplest way, selective screen capture. There is no way to prevent a screen capture and often the people who are using these images don’t care if the quality is not as good.

The benefits out weigh the risks though. I’ve gotten dozens of free lance gigs from both major and minor publications after photo editors came across one of my old blogs. My only advice, watch what you place on your blog. If you haven’t shown your subject the photos, why blog them? Your placing them out in the virtual world for everyone to see but not letting your subject know. If these images are going to be published anywhere, your subject has the right to know and should find out from you not from somebody else. It bit you in the butt this time because the first time he potentially saw these images was when they were being waived in his face in a taunt.

I make my images no larger than 550 px wide by 72 dpi. dumb down the quality to about 8 or run it through image ready and put it on a web setting so your files come out at a mere 25 kb. yeah it doesn’t prevent people from using them on the web but it also means that if they attempt to print it… it falls apart in a hurry and looks like crap. Sometimes running them a little smaller is not the end of the world. As visual artists we would all love everything to run 6 columns front page above the fold, double truck or the entire cover of a magazine, 99% of the time it doesn’t work that way, nor does it need to.

-S