Flickr image quality - watermark

Recently I have been busy scanning medium format film taken during the last two years. Scanning is fun, but very time consuming. I have now started to think about all the money and work I have put into my photo hobby, and also about how best to share photos on the Internet.

I upload images to Flickr without a watermark and with these specs:

File type: jpeg
Dimension: 1024x1024
Resolution: 72ppt
Bitdepth: 24
Colour profile: sRGB
File size: Between 250kb-1mb

Does this seem like okay settings, or should I possibly reduce the file size/quality? If I ever should become victim of image theft, would my files have any use for anyone, being of such low file quality?

I do not know much about these things, it would be very useful to learn more about how other people here share on the Internet (in a safe way).

Regards
Bjørn

Why would you put any images on the internet without a watermark if you are worried about infringements of your work?

I have studied other photographers´websites and web galleries, and seen quite a few without any watermarks. For instance in Ian Cameron´s "Transcient Light" website, the images are without a watermark (at least visible ones). The well known Portugese photographer Nanã Sousa Dias, does not have watermarks on his images on Flickr. So I have until now reasoned that "why should I bother with watermarks if internationally well known photographers have no watermarks on their work".

Now I would like to learn more about this, and am interested in your experience and practice.


Bjørn

Perhaps if your income comes from selling large prints or licensing high-res copies of your work, you aren't going to sweat about web-sized images, which are useless for these purposes. Your images are going to sell on their beauty, so ruining them with a watermark is probably not going to help you sell them.

Gary's sort of photography is more content oriented and suitable for magazines and online blogs. Therefore a web sized image is probably OK for his target market, so makes perfect sense to watermark the images in that case (especially since the watermark leads the person finding the image online back to his website where there are contact details etc).

Thanks for commenting Will! I understand the things you say, and that there are differences in practice between a pure landscape photographer and a photographer working with more content oriented material, which makes sense.

Bjørn

you could put them on Flickr so that nobody else can see them, i.e. tick the "Private" box before uploading.

He did specifically talk about 'sharing images on the internet' though. Making them private kind of defeats the object. You can make them non-downloadable which is kind of a deterrent against image theft (but determined thieves could do a screen-grab I suppose)...

A watermark will protect you against casual infringement to some degree, though if you place it on the edge, for aesthetic reasons, often it might just as well not be there at all, since it's easy enough to crop. If you put it in the centre, you achieve one end while defeating another.

Your settings won't protect against other web use, as you realise, but for commercial exploitation in print the file size will be its own protection.

Photos in your own website are a different proposition to social networking sites like Flickr where searches can bring up your work more regularly than your own site.

people also tend to have this perception that content in social networking sites is free to use as they use, wrongly of course. This could explain why photographers rarely out work on social networking sites without watermarks.

You can setup Flickr so that the original size images are not public.

Personally I hate watermarks and borders and people who rant on about how sharp and wonderful their lens or camera is while only posting a diminutive 640px copy.

Google image search is pretty good at spotting who'd embellished their website with one of your photos without asking - not that I really care since I don't make a living out of this and most of my shots are pretty cr*p anyway

Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts about this matter!

I have been searching for these types of settings on Flickr, without any luck. Where do you find these settings?

Rgerads
Bjørn

Here.

Thanks Karel!

Regards
Bjørn

I used to upload photos to flickr without any sort of watermarking.After a few months i found that many of my photos where on facebook and websites of unknown people.Now what i do is bulk watermark,resize(to smaller size) and also and exif to my photos using this tool http://www.masswatermark.com before i put anywhere in the web.This tool has direct connectivity to flickr so that you can export in a single workflow.The visible watermark can significantly reduce theft.And it also acts an advertisement

I limit most of my online photos to 800px along the longest side and watermark my medium format scans with a semi-transparent watermark. It won't stop image theft, but there's not much point trying to share them by plastering a watermark across the middle.

I think flickr tries to re-size the 800px to 1024 when you click on the image to enlarge it, which isn't really desirable.

Then again when I put my first website together in 2000, I was limiting the image to 400px along the long side with very obvious (dreadful) watermarks.

John.