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You might be interested in this example of how Arena Flowers have used Moo cards to promote their flower business.
Employees at Arena had some cards printed up before going to the Hampton Court Flower Show and it may be a great way for you to promote your photos by having them put onto the Moo cards to give away.
I am not sure that any site can offer anyone complete protection but what I can do is add a profile element that indicates your level of permission that you wish to apply to your work this blog article offers some good advice - How to Protect Your Pictures and Photos on the Internet
You can buy web software such as Winwatermark or you can join a site such as Istockphoto where they handle the selling for you and a certain amount of protection goes with this.
I have bought a few images using Istockphoto and Richard Loader also uses Istockphoto to sell too so it might be an idea to send Richard a message.
One thing you can do is to disable the right click. That way it can't be copied or pasted. You will need to enter some Java Script into the source code of your pages or who ever writes your site. Have a look at this: Disable Right Click in HTML.
If you try and right click it comes up with a message. That message can be anything such as "Images Protected by Copyright" etc. If someone really wanted a copy it can be done whatever measures you put on. The images are usually too small to be of any use anyway.
Regards,
Sean
I would be careful about trying to earn an income from selling your photography online.
One of the biggest problems, which applies to my own field as a freelance writer, is that there is an over abundance of such digital content, which has driven down the price of what you produce.
To give you an idea of the state of photography within newspapers, who you would feel have a demand for pics, many have laid off photographers.
They have done this to cut the wage bill, but also confident in the fact that because there is so much content out there they can put pressure on the price.
One thing I do think a photographer can do is gain a name and reputation for their work, but this will come through the writing you put alongside your images.
You are almost building a name and 'brand' around your work that then generates commissions, possibly talking gigs and invites to events.
An example of a photographer who has established a name for himself as a photographer in Manchester is Aidan O'Rourke:
http://www.aidan.co.uk/
See how his site features a wide selection of work with the story behind many of his pics, and whilst you can buy images the order still has to go through Aidan - but if you want a pic of Manchester and you see this site who you going to call?
Hope this helps
Craig
Related article: Using images effectively to improve search results
Richard Loader has written an interesting blog post about selling your photos with some good tips on monetising but more importantly using an already established agency to protect your copyright.
https://landscapejuice.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2074886%3ABlog...
Take a look at Frans Lanting's site - he doesn't use the right click method, just small clear images with unobstructive water marking.
Selling images from your own site is a tough call, it will be hard work to promote in such a way to get a big enough audience. Far better to use an agency - if you are averse to microstock then try one of the Garden Photography agencies like Garden Picture Library they have the right contacts. They'll take a cut but they do make sales.
Craig's item on gettting your images found by search engines is all you need to know on that subject.
Moo cards are great for promoting what you do - I get mine free as an iStock exclusive photog.
The whole world of pro photography is being shaken up at present - the credit thing and digital have been major contributing factors. There is still room for some big names but becoming one of those is hard going - easier, is to be part of the long tail and make a modest income reliably rather than take the high risk strategy..........unless you are confident that your work is of the very highest standard that is.
See the power of microstock in this example taken by my son......an old telly in a grungy setting - this image has sold 644 times!
I hate that! Prevents all other right-click actions, and makes me click-off the site more often than not. Takes me only a couple of seconds to View Source if I want to steal the picture anyway ...
Use a watermark, and a low-resolution image for the preview. You can also embed "secret" information in the image so that you can pursue people who steal the image. I've seen systems using Flash to display images, which make it harder to steal the photograph - but I can still do a screen-grab, which if I want it for my website is going to probably be sufficient quality. I've also seen quite a cute system whereby there is a "magnified square" so you can hover the mouse over the low quality image and a hi-res "zoom" is shown of just that bit - useful to see the detail in the picture, but the whole thing is never actually shown.
All in all pretty difficult to protect images on the web.
Take a look at this article I have written on Landscape Juice this morning.
This could be the answer to all your prayers.
Regards
Phil