Hi guys, a few of you may have seen this.

Do you use flickr as hosting for your images? Do you protect them so no-one can download, well as with everything someone has managed to get around this, see link below for full info:

http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/05/easier-way-to-download-protected-photos-at-flickr/

So my question, is there any software that would able you to protect your work from downloads, apart from hosting images yourself, is there are good software available that one could use and install to host images.

What do you guys think about this?

Have you seen this article on TWIP (http://twipphoto.com/archives/609) ? From what I understand they are now looking at getting another site to host their photo competitions etc from now on. Shame flickr couldnt even be bothered to respond to them.

It's easy enough to download most images, whether they're protected or not. I can't see how anyone can stop it, there's always a way round these things.

Having looked into this for photo web sites I concluded that, at the very least, if an image is displayed on screen you can get a copy at the displayed resolution by a simple screen grab. I can't see a way round that one.

Not really anyway to prevent people downloading images I'm afraid. Unfortunately it seems the majority don't see why it should be an issue. I even had a guy try and tell me once I should be flattered he wanted to steal it because it meant someone must like my image! :rant:

Only thing that will go someway to protect your images is to embed a semi-transparent watermark in the image and not just at one corner that can be cropped out.

Of course while that means the image is not so attractive to download, it is not so attractive at all.

Yes I agree there are many ways of capturing an image from a website and capturing the screen is fine as it would provide a low quality image however, in the Original Post I have put a link to a post that now enables a person to download the full resolution image.

As Dafoot mentions I think the only way of doing something is to use watermarks, and not use full resolution images.