Facebook Permission

Hi all

I recently had a request from a visitor to my website to share some of my (landscape) photographs with her friends via facebook...

I'm generally in favour of the sharing of things, and quite happy to share my photographs, particulary as they're uploaded to my clikpic site at 72dpi so not really capable of being printed...

I currently have a clikpic watermark across them (I know, not great), and am increasingly feeling this gets in the way of the photographs themselves (and note that many landscape photographers these days don't seem to watermark pictures on their websites at all...)... so am considering removing this shortly from all low res pics I upload...

My questions:

a) Is there anything I should be aware of when granting permission to my website visitor to share my photographs on facebook (am I somehow in a way I don't understand waiving all rights to the pictures for instance)...?

b) The request appears to be genuine enough, and as I've said, I really don't mind them being shared, but should I be covering myself with some sort of "not for profit use" legalese just in case?

c) Is there an easy way I can suggest for her to share the pictures via facebook apart from screen grabbing (I don't have a facebook page or link myself)?

d) I do copyright all my jpegs electronically with my email address as part of the metadata when they leave Lightroom... does anyone know if this survives when uploading them to the web/getting screen grabbed?

e) Anything else I've missed?

Thanks very much... this is a new area for me, so all contributions/thoughts gratefully received...

Best

You can let her post links to pages in your gallery - they will look like this when posted on Facebook:




(I did not follow through and hit the post button, just did this to show you what it looks like).

Notice there's a little preview of the image, but when you click on it, you'll be taken to YOUR website. This is totally different to screengrabbing your images and actually posting them herself.

It's extremely common to post links to things you like on Facebook. It's kind of her to ask but really if you post images on the internet people are within their rights to post links to them. It's what the internetz is all about really. It's clearly to your benefit in this case since it will generate traffic to your own site.

You are not 'waiving the rights' to anything, the images remain on your website and belong to you, you're simply letting someone tell other people about your work and sharing a link to your stuff. Nothing to be the slightest bit hesitant about.

Will... thanks very much for this... very helpful indeed and much appreciated...

Best

None of your metadata survives uploading to facebook.

It's nice of someone to ask to share your image, but it doesn't stop someone else just doing a screen-grab and downloading it. The more it's shared the more likely this becomes. Personally I started to watermark all my images on facebook, and upload them at a reduced resolution. The watermark is fairly unobtrusive however. I've found a number of my images on facebook used without permission or credit, but nowhere near as many as I have from Flickr used on Tumblr, to whom I am repeatedly issuing take-down orders in spite of disabling downloading of my images from Flickr.