It saddens me to learn about this. The whole reason I created an account here was to post my gallery online with a reputable website. I have been to far too many photo contest websites where somebody's unlevel, poorly composed, half-blurry family or pet photo walks away with the winning shot. That's not for me. Since all of these sites had copyright protection (no right-clicking and copying) I figured surely Shutterbug would have security for photographers' work. This is very disappointing indeed.

First of all, there is no such thing as not being able to right click to save. Any image you see on a web page is already in your browser's cache on your computer. If you get fooled by that right click java script, just use a different browser, or save the page and include pictures. All the right click option does is prevent people who don't want your images from stealing them. You can use a screen capture if nothing else works. That's especially useful for sliced images.

But now getting to the solution. It's up to you to protect your images on the web. Never upload an image that doesn't have a copyright in the image and never upload an image that is larger than it needs to be.

Here's an article on image security on the web I wrote for my web site, which also ran in Shutterbug a few years ago.

My compliments Larry; that really is an excellent article. Particularly since you quite rightly pointed out that it's the photographer's responsibility to protect his or her own copyright.

In the end there's absolutely no way to keep people from copying any images you post; it's a fundamental browser function after all. The real trick is to post pictures with enough pixels and image density to look good displayed on the computer screen but not enough to stand any enlargement without serious pixilation.

I've always shied away from imprinting my images with a copyright notice, but you made a great point in saying that every copied image is an advertisement for my work, and I think I'll begin the practice.

I had not given much thought about copy-righting my photos before posting them mainly becuase i didn't think they were that good. Also, the other day, i did the "right click" thing on one of them from the galleries, put it on my desktop, and went to make it a background for my desktop through the control panel. it was so pixel-destroyed, it wasn't even worth looking at. Maybe it is a good idea to put the copyright symbol and name on it though, in case for some reason it ever becomes famous - this was a good discussion. I was particularly happy to notice that a photo is automatically copy-righted as soon as you take it - it's only if you want to file paperwork with the feds that you have to, and that protects you if it ever really becomes a legal issue.