• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Preventing high quality photos from being downloaded from a Website

Status
Not open for further replies.

larry8533

New Member
Joined
Jan 20, 2021
Messages
6
Lightroom Version Number
11.2 Release Camera Raw 14.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
We'd like to post samples of photo work on a WIX website. Visitors to the site should be to be able to see a preview, and click to see a larger version that will fill their screen.
We don't want the visitors to be able to download a quality copy.

The photos of the originals are 4000 x 2200 Pixels.
We have reduced the web versions to about 2000 x 1125.

Can WIX be configured to turn off the download option?
Are there websites that WIX could link to that would prevent a download?

What's a good resolution to use for the posted photos that would capture the quality of the photos, but not be so good as to prevent the visitors from downloading a quality version that they could distribute in an unauthorized fashion, to be printed or posted elsewhere?

Thanks.
 
Once you display a photo on a user's screen there is no way to prevent them from taking a screen shot.
 
Wouldn't there be a limit to how large a screen shot could be printed and still retain quality?
A 2000x1125 pixels image can be printed quite large with good quality (A4 size is no problem, A3 is still good enough for most people). And if you display such an image on a website, then people who visit this website can download them. It’s as simple as that.
 
I don't know the WIX platform but I assume you can configure your website with it to prevent a download. that is a right click "save image as" operation.

However, as stated by others there is nothing to prevent someone taking a screen shot of the image. A screen shot will only be able to capture one image pixel per screen pixel. So, if you're displaying an image in a 600 x 800 pixel cell on the web page, no matter what size the actual image file is you sent to that cell, the best that anyone could screen grab would be 600 x 800 pixels.

In terms of sizing the image it all depends on how big a window you're putting it in and the resolution of the monitor being used. If you size the web [page cell for the image in pixels - say 600 x 800 then the image will display larger on lower resolution monitors and smaller on higher resolution monitors. However, if you size your cell by inches or centimeters or % of screen width and height, you need to provide enough pixels in the image to fill the cell on what you think people will be displaying it on. For example a 4k monitor would be pretty standard these days and they are typically 3840 x 2160. How many PPI that translates to depends on the physical size of the monitor. Anyway, do some math - or don't worry about it too much and register your images with the copyright office.
 
"...configure your website with it to prevent a download. that is a right click "save image as" operation. However, as stated by others there is nothing to prevent someone taking a screen shot of the image. "

Even with right-click-save-as disabled, it doesn't take much technical skill to get the URL of the image and download it directly. In Chrome, you can right-click the image or a nearby part of the page and do Inspect and then grab the URL from there.
 
In Chrome, you can right-click the image or a nearby part of the page and do Inspect
Or in Edge or Firefox. Probably in any browser.
 
A 2000x1125 pixels image can be printed quite large with good quality (A4 size is no problem, A3 is still good enough for most people). And if you display such an image on a website, then people who visit this website can download them. It’s as simple as that.
And to top it off, I can upsize it really well with Topaz Gigapixel AI for larger prints.
Gigapixel currently has, imo, some issues with fur and hair. Otherwise it is shockingly good.
You are dependent for accurate colors on whether the screen is calibrated or not if you use a screen capture.
 
Wouldn't there be a limit to how large a screen shot could be printed and still retain quality?
There is not one single number. It all depends on what level of quality someone cares about. Although 300 ppi is a standard for photo printing on quality paper, you don’t always need that. For example, if someone wanted to steal a photo because they want to sell a T-shirt or a mug of it, 150 ppi is probably good enough because the media can’t show much more detail than that anyway.

So let’s work out what that would mean. If someone wanted to print let’s say an 8 × 8 inch T-shirt image at 150 ppi, 8 times 150 equals 1200, so if they can grab a 1200 × 1200 pixel image off a website, that’s all they need. It’s not a lot of pixels and is not even considered close to a large image. To stop them, you have to upload web site images that might be 800 or 1000 pixels long. But that’s not a great solution, because then the images can’t come close to filling the screen on today’s large, high resolution displays. They will look small, or pixelated if enlarged.

Looking at it from the other end, suppose a client wants their web site images to look pixel-sharp in a full screen website slide show when viewed on a 27" 4K display. Those are typically 3840 × 2160 pixels, so a photo sized to fit that would match those pixel dimensions. What is that at 300 ppi? Well, 3840 pixels / 300 ppi = 12.8 inches, so that’s a nice 300 ppi 8 × 12 print for anyone who downloads or takes screen shots of the slide show images.

It’s a very tricky problem to solve. You just have to pick some middle ground number and run with it. High enough to impress, but not so high that someone can download the whole original resolution.

Some photographers take a more proactive approach that’s based on something other than fear (of piracy). Trey Ratcliff uploads unprotected high resolution images to his website and yet claims to be able to sustain his business selling large prints of them and licensing them. It’s not that he has no protections. He makes sure everything is registered at the US Copyright Office, then his team watches for infringements and if found, the settlements or legal judgments against the infringers are a revenue stream in itself. I have heard of other photographers building that into their business model: Upload at a high resolution for a quality presentation, but be equipped to prosecute infringers. (May not work if the infringer is outside your country, of course.)
 
To add to the technical options, on Chrome at least you can CTRL U and inspect the code. You can usually spot the image and download from there.
 
Yeah - the short version is: if you don't want people to get a copy of something, don't put it on the internet. It really is that simple. All the workarounds amount to security by obscurity, which is not security at all, especially with "Google, how do I...?" so easy.
 
Watermarks haven't been mentioned. They can be removed, of course, and the more obvious the watermark, the bigger its impact on the photo's appearance.

But as with overlay layers or right click scripts, remember that the objective here isn't to stop the malevolent visitor downloading the pictures - it's to make it less worthwhile by increasing the effort that they must put into it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top