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The Digital Domain: Images and the Internet
For many people, one of the joys of photography is being able to share your images with others. In the days of film photography, the end result was the print or slide. Therefore to share images, you had to show them your photo albums and sit patiently while they pretended to be interested in your holiday shots or your kid’s 1st birthday party. Of course you could always scan images an e-mail them to people, but not many people could be bothered with that.
With the rapid growth of digital photography, and the prevalence of the internet, new methods of sharing photographs have appeared which are collectively known as photo sharing sites or photo communities. One of the most popular of these at the moment is www.flickr.com (owned by Yahoo!).
So what does a site like Flickr offer?
- A place to upload you photos and share them with others.
- Organise photos into sets and collections.
- A place to both give and receive comments on photographs.
- A place to meet other photographers, possibly with similar interests by joining special interest groups.
- A place to seek advice from some of the many technical forums (groups often dedicated to a particular make and model of camera). Fellow Flickrers (I just made that up) are generally very helpful.
- A place to find out about different cameras and the results you can get from them.
- A place to find examples of very high quality images.
- It’s own basic e-mail system which is handy for contacting other users.
- Unfortunately, it now also offers video uploads too!!!
Flickr has two types of account:
- Free account - some limits including:
- upload limited to 100MB per month
- limited to the most recent 200 photos visible at one time
- photo size limited to 1024 pixels on the longest side
- limited to 3 sets
- Pro account - cost at time of writing is $US 25 per year. No limits
With a user community of many million users, and over 2,250,000,000 photos currently online and around 3 to 5 million new pictures uploaded to their servers each day it is certainly worth registering and taking a look for yourself. What have you got to lose?
Other sites you may want to look at are:
www.photobucket.com (over 4,000,000,000 photos, and 6,000,000,000 uploads per day. It claims to be the biggest photo sharing site in the world due to links with MySpace, although it’s features fall well short of Flickr.)
www.shutterfly.com (claims over 1,000,000,000 photos)
www.webshots.com (400,000,000 photos)
www.fotopic.net (130,000,000 photos)
www.smugmug.com (230,000,000 photos)
www.myphotoalbum.com (50,000,000 photos)
www.fotki.com
www.phanfare.com
www.facebook.com (although not a photo sharing site - it does have over 4,000,000,000 pictures online. A word of warning … image quality is poor as all images are resized and heavily compressed on upload).
Copyright and the Internet
If you put your photos on the Internet someone may take them and use them against your will. They would be breaching your copyright and therefore breaking the law but none-the less it's very hard, well essentially impossible to stop them.
If you are going to share your photos online you just need to be aware of this as a possibility. As we are not lawyers we cannot advise you on the intracacies of copyright law around the world however your legal position is essentially this:
If you post an image on the Internet you still own the copyright for that image, you don't give it up by publishing the image and you don't have to register your copyright.
Copyright is covered by something called the Berne convention which the majority of the World's countries have signed up to. A fundamental principle of the convention is that copyright is automatically assigned to a creator of a piece of work (in this case a photograph) without the creator needing to actively do anything to register that copyright. In some countries such as the USA though you will be able to claim greater damages against someone breaching your copyright if you have registered your copyright before infringement.
It may be possible for someone to use a photo you created without breaching your copyright under "fair use" terms. This may include for example where an image you have taken is deemed to be sufficiently newsworthy and therefore "in the public interest".
If you are concerned about protecting your images the easiest thing to do is not to post them on the Internet; various techniques such as watermarking or "right-click" protection won't stop someone who is determined to get the image. Ultimately trying to prevent someone saving an image that is visible in their web browser is futile, in order for an image to be visible in a web browser it must first be downloaded. This is how the web works, when you look at something in your web browser you are looking at a copy that your browser has downloaded and stored on your computer.
Uploading only small versions of your images may discourage those who intend to use your images without permission. But if they only want to post a small version on their own website it won't help...
Some people feel that copyright is too black and white. You may for example be happy for your images to be used for non-commercial purposes or you may be happy for people to make derivitave works from your images. A more granular set of permissions is the aim of the concept of Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/about/) |
