Photo Gallery Forums

Hi people.
I'll cut right to the chase and ask;
What do you think about watermarks, copyright symbols etc in the gallery? I'm thinking about anybody being able to copy the picture and save it to their harddrive....Is it as simple as disabling the menu options with the "save" buttons, or is there a simple workaround people can exploit?

I'm considering the extra work with tagging all pictures with my email, name, URL etc....

Or is it a simple embedding-module on the way with the next release of X2 ? Karl ?

Actually watermarking can be made but you have to take two things in consideration:

1. Images will be re-compressed.
When you upload jpg we will add watermark and save it as jpg again this will make it progressively worse.

2. We will have to store orignals somewhere.
To re-watermark or just detect which images been processed already we will have to keep the original images somewhere outside www root. Which is headache by itself, because we can't use .htaccess on windows and this gonna require additional options, settings and the like.

So...basically, I should do the watermarking in CS4 at home, and just let the gallery "do it's thing".
Another part of the questions, probably the most important part, is; How big is the risk of the pictures getting stolen from the site? Should I activate the "Save this file" option / "fullsize in browser-window", and attach my signature in the bottom ?

I would recommend doing watermarking at home. This to avoid double JPG compression on your images. There are programs like www.irfanview.com that can batch-watermark images in a folder. I would recommend this process:

1. Have your original full size images available.
2. Create a batch process in irfanview, that watermarks the photos, and also resizes then downwards to a web-fridnly size at the same time.
3. Make sure you set processed files to save in a separate folder.

How big is the risk of pictures getting stolen from your site? That is in fact a very huge risk ... By publishing your photos in the imagevue gallery(or any other way on the internet), you are making your photos available for people to grab. There is no way to prevent this, although they will only be able to get their hands on low-resolution version of course, unusable for anything professional.

The only true protection, is to watermark your images. This renders your photos unusable to anyone.