Protecting Your Images Online

Being able to share your images with the world via the Web is a glorious thing, but, in doing so, you risk having your images stolen (gasp!). It's frighteningly easy for thieves to snatch photos from your website to sell or use as their own, so it's important to take a few extra steps to protect them. You can deter these evil-doers in several different ways, including posting smaller versions of your images (640x480 pixels, for example), using photo galleries such as www.smugmug.com that prevent folks from Ctrl-clicking (right-clicking on a PC) to copy your images to their hard drives, embedding copyright info, adding watermarks, or using Zoomify (see the box on Zoomify Your Enlargements). Read on for the scoop on each option.

Embedding Copyright Info

One of the first steps you can take toward protecting your work is to embed copyright and contact info into the image file by choosing File→File Info. Sadly, it won't keep folks from stealing your image (heck, they won't even see it unless they choose File→File Info themselves), but it might make them think twice about taking it if they do find a name attached to it. Alternatively, you can declare that the image is in the public domain, granting anyone and everyone a license to use it. See Figure 17-14 for more info.

If you choose File→File Info, you can attach all kinds of descriptive info to your image (top). Once you change the Copyright Status pop-up menu to Copyrighted, Photoshop puts a © in the document window's title bar (bottom).You can also choose Public from this menu to give anyone permission to use your image.

Figure 17-14. If you choose File→File Info, you can attach all kinds of descriptive info to ...

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