Photo Babble
So I’m halfway through moving all my photography off my web server and over to fotki.com. It’s taking a while. It’s not hard, nor is it a huge job, it’s just mind-numbingly boring. So I do about 10 galleries a day.
Recently I realized a problem with what I am doing. By moving my images off of my web server where I have meta tags in the html as well as a robots.txt file to deter search engine bots, and putting the images on a photo site, I’m opening myself up to the images being catalogged by search engines like Google Images. When people find images via search engines like that, they tend to act like the images are public domain, and mine aren’t.
I may decide to password-protect the folders and maybe even put the password in plain view. Doing this would deter search engine bots, but still allow people to view the images.
See, the problem with Google Images and other search engines catalogging images alone, is that when people then do a search for, say, “pink flower”, the search engine then serves up your photo without the website that surrounds it. Yeah, the user can click to see the website, but most don’t. Most just download the photo for their own use, i.e. steal it. So even if I have “Do not steal my pictures!” all over my website in red text, people will never see that part.
But allowing people on fotki.com or flickr.com to view my images, the viewers are most likely other photographers who understand this and wouldn’t just steal my images. No, not every fotki.com or flickr.com user is honest, but most are of the same mindset when it comes to how photos are to be shared (for viewing enjoyment, for feedback, not for stealing).
My philosophy may be wrong, but it’s worth a try.
I don’t know yet, I have to think on this one a while. Well, most of them are low-res enough (small enough) that even if someone did steal an image, they couldn’t do much with it, not even makea 4×6 print out of it.