OT - Picture Protection Software

John222 wrote on 9/23/2014, 9:28 PM
Several years back, when my kids were in school, they would download pictures from the online encyclopedias for school projects. While the online pictures looked great, the downloaded pictures would look very low rez and have watermarks on them when you tried to print them. Anyone know what software they might have been using? Reason I ask is, my wife does a lot of ancestry research. Sometimes it takes hundreds of dollars and many hours to obtain a record and once posted to the ancestry website someone can hijack the picture and post it as their own. I'm currently adding embossed watermarks via Gimp so she at least gets credit, but would like something better.

Comments

Gary James wrote on 9/23/2014, 9:32 PM
This might possibly be what was used.
Byron K wrote on 9/24/2014, 3:01 AM
The thing is, how hi res is the image on the website. Unfortunately, all a person has to do is screen capture a full screen of the image, import into Paint, crop the image and save as .png or .jpg. The best thing you have to "protect" you pictures is likely water markings.
John222 wrote on 9/24/2014, 10:55 AM
That's a good point. Back in those day I would right click and either save or print and the results would be garbage. I can't recall if I ever tried a screen capture....
videoITguy wrote on 9/24/2014, 2:00 PM
There are a thousand ways to secure photos - did you know for example it is possible to post a good image on the web and write the server code so that the mouse right-click is disabled. In these cases a screen capture can be used - but the original post can be made small enough that screen cap will hose the resolution.

Digital rights management is yet another avenue of protection - with many different schemes.

Ancestry.com website will take high-resolution photo input upto 15Mb in size - but then reports it out to viewers such that it can be copied at much less in size.

Facebook will take high-resolution photo input - but automatically downconverts it to something approximating the original image.