Photo safety?

[highcave664]

I want to share some of my own photos on fb. I wanna share them with their real size. Can anyone share any ways to ensure safety of those photos so that no one can download in such a big size and distort or make any obscene change. I need it very urgent . If possible please tell more then one solution.

[Mark]

Facebook will shrink your photos no matter what size you upload them at. It has to; there are so many photos uploaded there that even with Facebook's resources, there probably isn't enough space to put the all at their original size.

To share photos at full size, you would use something like a personalised website from Zenfolio, etc. I think even Flickr downsamples pictures a bit, although not as much as Facebook does.

To protect the pictures from being changed, you could watermark them, which makes it harder (but certainly not impossible) for people to mess about with them. As far as I know, there's no way to disable downloading on Facebook, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure on that. I think that if you upload a picture, anyone who can see it can download it.

Basically, putting a picture on Facebook is not a good idea if you want that picture to be "safe".

[Steve P]

Ditto all that Mark said. There are FAR better alternatives than FB for photo sharing, especially if you want some semblance of security. There are sites, such as Pbase, where you can upload photos and place them in password protected galleries, though Pbase and sites such as Zenfolio are not free. Yes, watermarking can be an aid to prevent changes, ... but, and this is a big but, for a watermark to be effective, it has to practically ruin the aesthetic of the photo. In other words, it has to be large enough and obtrusive enough into important, intricate areas of the photo that trying to remove it becomes almost impossible. So it is a Catch 22 situation. Watermark it to the point of actually securing the photo, and ruin the looks of the photo, or make the watermark more subtle and less obtrusive, but then it serves no purpose for protection.

Finally, watermark or not, ANYTHING that is on a computer monitor, be it "protected" or not, is there for the taking. If you cannot live with that, then you have no business putting ANYTHING on any website.

steve

[John P]

Once your photos are "out there" in whatever program or software, somebody somewhere will have the skills to be able to get hold of them if they really want to do so. By remarks above it seems that the file sizes within FB are small, so the images could not be used to make large posters.

Think of all those news items about what the CIA and FBI can get their hands on via the world wide web.

[joedlh]

It's a bad idea to put full resolution shots on the web, unless they are on a password protective page. Every image that you can see on your monitor can be taken and used without your knowledge. Low resolution shots have little potential for the kinds of things that will make money for the thief. In addition, monitors are relatively low resolution. So a high resolution shot will be bigger than the screen, making it more difficult to appreciate.

[B K]

You can't upload full size images to facebook. They don't support that.

Get a flickr account instead. It's free, and you can upload full size images to share. You can also make the images private (they will not appear publicly), and you can send people a guest pass to view the image, to share with only those people who you give the URL to.

If you post images publicly, on a public forum or image sharing website, there is no way to prevent someone downloading them. If they can see the image, it has already been downloaded!!!

http://www.flickr.com

You can also use other free services such as dropbox http://www.dropbox.com - there is a photo album feature. To share the album you simply share the URL, and since the album is not published publicly, only those you give the URL to can see the images.

[deep blue2]

The only way to be 100% sure your photos aren't stolen is not to upload them.