Protection.watermarking.onl​ine size.

I post my photos on facebook but im having 3 issues. First is size. I tried 640px and was small so i went 1400px and showed great detail. What is best. Also i want to watermark my photos which i am doing to some success but dont want too much or too little. Ill put up a sample photo of how im putting them up now. Just need some suggestions on size and watermark as watermark works depending on background

Are we assuming your goal is to prevent image theft? If so, you need to not post your images online, because if someone wants them, they will take them.

I'm on my phone and could crop that watermark out and have a fine photo I seconds.

If you have another goal, well, tell us.

i put a light mark in the center. just wondering how people mark theres for online use. the mark i tried in the middle of the image doesnt really work and works less when in tree's etc in the image. I sell a few photos to help pay for my camera gear but want to try not leave them that they can be robbed but dont want to destroy them either

I watermark images bottom left corner. Usually with opacity at something like 75%... it's the copyright symbol and my website domain. Big enough to be seen, but not big enough to block anything important in the image.


I have tried putting the watermark in the middle of the image, but then the image looks like crap. I agree with left hand brisket...people will take what they want, and those people will never buy.
I don't plan to make any $ of anything I post online. I have seen my images printed and put up on walls with the watermark cropped out - and I'm Meh about that. It means they liked it. That's good enough for me. We care more about what we do than anyone else does, I think......

For images that I'm hired to shoot i deliver them without a watermark, and sometimes the client provides a watermark for me to apply to the image.

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #18602726
Are we assuming your goal is to prevent image theft? If so, you need to not post your images online, because if someone wants them, they will take them.

I'm on my phone and could crop that watermark out and have a fine photo I seconds.

If you have another goal, well, tell us.

I personally can't understand why anyone who takes their time to be on a photo-forum would take the time to discourage other photographers from watermarking their images. Honestly I can't understand why all advanced photographers don't want to have their watermark on their images. If you don't think the image is good enough for your name then edit that image out.

While you may be able to crop and clone out a watermark there's a good chance someone sharing the image won't take the time or doesn't know how to. Yes the watermark may help prevent thievery - but more importantly if the image is shared then at least it's marketing my name/website. It is also a subtle reminder that photography has some value verses this naive attitude that artists should give away their efforts for free.

I've been to many talks where some respected speaker shows slides that I know they don't have usage rights to and it's funny when an image comes up with the photographer's watermark. I feel this can be the same for posting images on Social Media to find out that an advertiser (say Wally World) can create a social media ad for bikes and then pull from the site's images of bikes. All electronically, how would you ever know - have a watermark on the image and that ad becomes an ad for your business.

Back to the OP: For your subject matter yes I would put the transparent mark in the center and have a second stronger one in a corner that identifies your website. Unless your friends object I see no reason not to have the watermark like you have it. If a bike company or editorial magazine wants to use that image they will ask for the image without the watermark and then at that point you can explain you license the image and it costs this much.

p.s. Friends will forgive your watermark if you give them a print for their refrigerator, the added benefit is they will wait for you on the trail to set up.

Reread my post, I didn't discourage watermarking, I just stated that a corner watermark is not going to discourage image theft. You pointed out yourself that people are willing to use watermarked photos in professional settings, so you apparently agree.


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Anto, if your goal is to sell prints, post images with a semi transparent watermark near the center of the image. 1000px should be plenty. For event photography if the individuals don't buy relatively quickly after the event, they probably won't buy. Once some time has passed, and you want to post the image as a "portfolio piece", export a larger image with the watermark in the corner, with a little transparency.

If you can set up and sell prints at the event, that would probably bring the most revenue.

Oh, and for online posting of small images, output sharpening is hugely important. Tweak those settings to get more apparent detail

I also agree with Left Handed Brisket. If someone wants to steal your on-line photo, nothing is going to stop them. So what's the point of defacing it with an ostentatious watermark? The real damage is if someone uses your image commercially or for a money-making venture without compensating you for it. The copyright notice is a legality. I put one near a bottom corner in a hue that blends in. I never post an image greater than 800pixels, which would not be useful for a quality print. Some kid taking a low res shot for his/her wallpaper is basically harmless. They'd never pay for it anyway and I would be unlikely to know that they did it.

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #18604506
Reread my post, I didn't discourage watermarking, I just stated that a corner watermark is not going to discourage image theft.

Of course you did, you claim it's pointless and a waste of time. Please site the evidence that watermarks don't discourage theft 100% of the time. You are assuming that anyone who wants to steal an image will automatically bypass the watermark the simple Fact is you do not know that. Yes you, someone invested in the field of photography, can easily crop out a watermark but you know you are taking the time to do that therefore internally you know you are stealing.

My point however is that a watermark is not just to prevent theft but can be used to market your website. The OP clearly stated he sells some of his images in an age where news outlets don't employ photojournalists how would someone know to contact the photographer on a shared image if there is no watermark?

archfotos wrote in post #18604530
Of course you did, you claim it's pointless and a waste of time. Please site the evidence that watermarks don't discourage theft 100% of the time. You are assuming that anyone who wants to steal an image will automatically bypass the watermark the simple Fact is you do not know that. Yes you, someone invested in the field of photography, can easily crop out a watermark but you know you are taking the time to do that therefore internally you know you are stealing.

My point however is that a watermark is not just to prevent theft but can be used to market your website. The OP clearly stated he sells some of his images in an age where news outlets don't employ photojournalists how would someone know to contact the photographer on a shared image if there is no watermark?

I didn't read what you're taking away from Left Handed Brisket's post, at all.
You inferred things...which he didn't say, in my opinion.

I stopped reading your post when you said I claimed "it was pointless and a waste of time"

Have a nice day.

i just shoot 2 days at a bikepark and want to sell the photos online to put money back into camera gear. I just post photos on facebook and that way people can tag each other. i have sold some but just though some sort of watermark might help stop people taking them. i dont ming them being used as profile pics when i have a mark on them as everyone will do that anyway. just unsure as to what size i should be posting to facebook and what quality also.

https://louisem.com …facebook-image-dimensions

I export @ 85% for online stuff.

Anto Modded wrote in post #18610472
i just shoot 2 days at a bikepark and want to sell the photos online to put money back into camera gear. I just post photos on facebook and that way people can tag each other. i have sold some but just though some sort of watermark might help stop people taking them. i dont ming them being used as profile pics when i have a mark on them as everyone will do that anyway. just unsure as to what size i should be posting to facebook and what quality also.

FB max size is 2048 on the long edge, fwiw.

I have no idea if this makes any sense, but I do it anyway ... posting half size, 1024, has seemed to work well.

Definitely export at 100 percent jpg quality and again, sharpen those suckers. Try what would seem to be an abnormally high "Amount" setting and an abnormally low "Radius" setting. Facebook re-compresses jpgs so giving them the least compressed images possible is key to maintaining detail.

I have read that if you upload png, they will not compress them. Haven't tried it though.

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #18610519
FB max size is 2048 on the long edge, fwiw.

I have no idea if this makes any sense, but I do it anyway ... posting half size, 1024, has seemed to work well.

Definitely export at 100 percent jpg quality and again, sharpen those suckers. Try what would seem to be an abnormally high "Amount" setting and an abnormally low "Radius" setting. Facebook re-compresses jpgs so giving them the least compressed images possible is key to maintaining detail.

I have read that if you upload png, they will not compress them. Haven't tried it though.

I would seriously consider using a JPEG quality below 100/12 if using Adobe software as your basis for comparison. With Adobe software you only get a total of 13 levels of compression, regardless of the scale used. The issue with using the JPEG file format is that it doesn't store the image data as RGB triplets, instead it works in a similar way to old analogue TV systems where the brightness is saved as one channel, and then two chromiance channels are used to provide the colour information. This means that even at the maximum quality setting you are going to suffer from conversion losses, as the data is transferred from one format to the other. At the maximum quality setting you don't actually get any data compression applied to the image, it's just the format change. I have actually seen JPEG files at maximum quality that were larger in size than the size required to hold the three 8 bit colour channels as individual pixels. If you must have the maximum in quality, and no conversion losses then you would be better off using an 8 bpc TIFF with lossless LZW compression. That though is generally not compatible with most hosting sites.

If you use a setting of 80/10 in other words two levels down from maximum you will get a JPEG file that is between 40 and 60% smaller than the equivalent uncompressed TIFF file. I have yet to be able to see any difference in a displayed image, be that on screen, or as a 16×12 300 ppi print between this level of compression, and the maximum quality. So what about measuring the differences between the images? Well the conversion losses are pretty much identical for both levels of compression, when compared to the original image data. In most cases where there is a difference in value for a pixel it will be limited to only one of the three colour channels, and that difference is mostly between ±1 and ±3 levels, with extreme values at ±5 or ±6. Oddly if you look at the difference between the two levels of JPEG compression the differences will be larger than the differences between each JPEG version and the original. Remember that it is the difference from the original that is important here, not that between different JPEG levels themselves.

I'm sure that FB and the other social media services have a target size for the image files that you upload that they will try to reach when they compress your image. After all they don't want to completely destroy the quality, since that would lead to complaints from users. With the smaller files that you get from the lower quality setting you may get lucky and FB might not recompress those images. If they do need to compress the image though the starting point for the new compression run is going to be basically the same, so you won't suffer any more with artifacts in the image than if they started with the max quality JPEG setting file.

If your goal is to sell prints then you really should be limiting the pixel size of the image severely, along with a large and obvious watermark. The problem is that the average person will, more often than not, be more than happy with an A4/8×12 print from a 1000px long edge digital image, printed on plain paper from the cheapest of inkjet printers. Especially if its "free". This is a case where using something like 640px is actually a good idea, since it will be really hard to get an acceptable print, even for the sort of person already mentioned. On top of that I would set the PPI value to something daft like 600 PPI, since that will in a lot of software then report the image size as 1.07" on the long edge. Again putting off the average user when it comes to trying to print the image themselves. How do I know this, it's simple I have seen people that I know try this with images they have pulled from the web.


Alan