Hello - I am a photographer and would like to sell a few items here as well. Since my photos are the main product, I need to avoid them being downloaded by anyone who looks at the shop. Is there a way to do this? I set up a store and had a friend test it - she was able to download the images with just a right click of the mouse!!

Thank you for your time and assitance,

Kory

Well, jpg image files can't be downloaded and resized to a resolution that would produce a great photograph on merchandise. In that way your photographs are safe since only small pics are usually shown in cafepress shops.

Thus, be sure not to display your photographs in high resolution.

Welcome to CafePress;

I understand your concern- I am a photographer with a number of Premium Shops here as well as on-line galleries at a number of web-sites.

There is no fool-proof way of preventing someone from saving and/or copying anything that is posted in the web. There are programmes that disable right-click but it is just as easy to get around them. In addition, some people use 'right click' for other commands so disabling it doesn't prevent theft and annoys a potential customer. If someone embeds an image in an Adobe Acrobat file, anyone with the full software (not just the Reader) can break it out.

What CafePress (and any reputable on-line gallery) does is make sure that the servers that store our high-quality production files are not accessable from the web; we can upload a production file but can not ever download it.

Then they use smaller-sized files to display our images; the largest I've seen on CP is about 480 pixels wide. If you print that on a 300dpi printer it prints about an inch and a half. If you force the printer to make is 6" wide it would print at 80dpi and look terrible. Of course that won't stop someone who really wants to take a 480 pixel image, enlarge it, paint out the watermark and touch it up, enlarge it again, touch it up again and so on.... but it decreases the likelihood.

But as I started by saying, it is not possible to prevent someone from copying anything on a web-page; making it a pain is the best we can do.

Most images shown are not large enough to make quality new products. They result in poor quality images. Right click disable does virtually nothing to stop image theft. At the same time disable right click impairs normal web navigation and ticks off a lot of customers.

Want to capture what you see on screen? Hit the PRT SCR (print screen) button on your key board. Open your graphics program, select new, paste the contents of your clipboard. No right click involved. Want something easier? Find your internet temporary files cache - drag the desired image file into a folder - well it works best with IE. Want to capture the active window? Alt+prtscr will do that. See nothing you do is going to stop someone from copying your image if they want to, and mostly they don't even need any special software to do it.

This kind of selling does risk image theft. Most image theft measures are either completely useless (e.g. disable right click) or exclude many potential customers (e.g. Flash) or are so slow as to impair sales (again, Flash). If you show images large enough to be appreciated then you risk image theft. The available watermarking is at least as good a deterrent was disable right click. Watermarking can be defeated by any one halfway competent in Photoshop.

You can put your copyright information inconspicuously on the image itself. You can use a service such as TinEye to try to look for stolen images (it isn't yet very effective because the database is too small, but it is worth using).

Customers of photography sites seem somewhat more willing to put up with the navigation impairments caused by attempts to protect images. I think that is typically because they are looking at their own stuff, or for their own stuff, so they can't just leave and go someplace else for competing items. At least that is me.

You will also want to consider, beyond image protection, whether this is the right market for your kind of items. Photography alone is a tough sell. Most CP customers are looking for messages, something that speaks for them, says who they are, expresses an opinion, makes a statement. Art works better on some other sites. The only one we can mention here is ImageKind because it is a CP company.

I have several thousand images here and a few instances of theft. Maybe my stuff just isn't good enough to steal. In those cases a proper take down notice got the items removed quickly.

Oh - and your full size graphics you upload? Not available on line, not even to you. Only the thumbnails are available. Some are large thumbnails, to be sure, but nothing like the full image size.

Thank you all for your feedback - I appreciate it!!

On top of all the great advice you have already been given, I would like to add that you can set your section images to be different than the images on the products. This way, you can upload the design/artwork with a watermark overlay on it so that people who try to copy the section image will have a nice copyright ruining the image for reuse.