DSLRUsers.com

Andrew, that was a very interesting read. I wonder if this tradition of Flickr not respecting photographers rights will change with their new tie up with Getty, or possibly get worse?

good read thanks andrew, I was shopping around for some hosting, but I was leaning toward flickr, but after this thread maybe i will have to re-think.

Cheers
Mak

Very interesting, but what is the solution? Is there a way to prevent pople from downloading or printing? I heard you can use a transparent GIF to allow people to see but not download your images.

Try these Flickr settings:

Start from Your Account Page- Personal Information & click on 'If its Searshable' under Your Profile heading, Then tick:
Hide your photostream from searches on 3rd party sites that use the API?

Not perfect, but better than nothing


Then under Privacy & Permissions, Change all these to 'Only You'
Who can download your stuff
Who can share your photos or video?
Who can print your photos
Who can blog your stuff

Change: Hide your stuff from public searches to Yes, on 3rd-party sites

Then Under Extending Flickr take out all aplications that use the API under - Account links

When other people look at your work, a blank GIF file sits over them so it cant be downloaded using right click.
Ive noticed that my work could still be blogged even when I set 'Who can blog your stuf' to Only you (using Flickr Stats to see) until I disabled the API

If you havent enabled Flickr Stats, you realy cant see what is happening with your photos.
Also, only upload small versions of your photos, so if they do get through the API, they cant get a high quality photo anyway.

Also, dont use Creative Commons at all.

I don't think you understand what Flickr does. It's there to make your photos as widely available as possible. It does that reasonably well. Flickr has never done very well with copyright, or with usability, or a whole raft of other stuff. But for sheer "giant piles of photos" it's done very well indeed. I got a little past the "truly atrocious UI" and discovered that they were only interested in the "you must pay flickr" part of copyright then lost interest.

zafra52 wrote:Very interesting, but what is the solution? Is there a way to prevent people from downloading or printing? I heard you can use a transparent GIF to allow people to see but not download your images.

the spaceball.gif flickr use to "protect" your images from being downloaded is very easy to hack past.
I complained to flickr about this and they responded that it's only designed to deter people from downloading, not prevent.
they suggested i upload small res files only, but given a selling point of their pro account is the archiving/back-up of images, it seems rather disingenuous.
in any case, i got a very clear impression that they don't care at all about protecting your images.

the advantages of flickr seem to be the number of users, as the social networking aspect of the site is great and i've met a lot of people and learnt a lot of stuff.
but as a place to showcase your images, i'm not sure i'd recommend it. i'm looking for an alternative in any case...

and now stashy.com is stealing images...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfiegoodrich/2672330587/

Thanks for the tips Bigzzie!