Presenting LF photos in Internet. How?

[Ed Richards]

> It seems extremely foolish to depend on such a mechanism for any serious security purpose.

But we do not have any serious security purposes. We are just showing images, perhaps to sell a few, mostly because we can. if we really needed security, we would never send a digital file out for printing and we would keep our prints locked away. It is all a balance.

[Matt Blaze]

> It seems extremely foolish to depend on such a mechanism for any serious security purpose.

But we do not have any serious security purposes. We are just showing images, perhaps to sell a few, mostly because we can. if we really needed security, we would never send a digital file out for printing and we would keep our prints locked away. It is all a balance.

Then why play games by publishing images in platform-specific formats that don't actually provide any real protection? It likely serves your interests better to simply make the photo available in a format that maximizes the number of end users it reaches while providing information on how to license it, order prints, or whatever.

The original poster didn't articulate what he was actually trying to protect, but he seemed to concerned about theft of some sort. At the same time, he wants to make his image available at high quality. Pretend pseudo-secure content protection mechanisms will not help him achieve either of those goals.

[Ed Richards]

> Then why play games by publishing images in platform-specific formats that don't actually provide any real protection?

Because security is always a question of costs. It does provide a level of protection against casual downloading and copying. It does not prevent a dedicated image thief from getting the images, but it may be a reasonable tradeoff. We make security tradeoffs all the time. If you are on the Internet, you can be hacked and have images stolen off your harddrive. If your work is really valuable, it is easy enough to break into a studio and steal the whole drive. The more you secure it, the harder it is to use.

Zoomify has side-benefits - a lot of folks do not have viewers that let them handle large images very easily. Showing LF prints effectively is a real problem, so anything that might help is worth some investigation and risk. Otherwise we might as well use point and shoot digital - no one knows it is LF on the WWW.

[Matt Blaze]

> Then why play games by publishing images in platform-specific formats that don't actually provide any real protection?

Because security is always a question of costs. It does provide a level of protection against casual downloading and copying. It does not prevent a dedicated image thief from getting the images, but it may be a reasonable tradeoff. We make security tradeoffs all the time. If you are on the Internet, you can be hacked and have images stolen off your harddrive. If your work is really valuable, it is easy enough to break into a studio and steal the whole drive. The more you secure it, the harder it is to use.

Zoomify has side-benefits - a lot of folks do not have viewers that let them handle large images very easily. Showing LF prints effectively is a real problem, so anything that might help is worth some investigation and risk. Otherwise we might as well use point and shoot digital - no one knows it is LF on the WWW.

Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but long experience with content protection schemes and the Internet suggests that you're wrong about the nature of this particular security tradeoff. Once anything of any value is "protected" with Zoomify (and I'm sorry to be picking on them here; I'm not sure they even claim security as a benefit), someone will create a tool to extract full resolution images from it. And then its veneer of security disappears. Retroactively. For everything ever published with it.

There may be reasons to use such tools for image publishing, but security isn't one of them. This is a tradeoff that favors the attacker, not the defender.

[paulr]

This seems like a way to invent new problems in order to solve imaginary ones.

The web lets people see a representation of your work. It's not about perfectly duplicating it. Good thing ... imagine the trouble sculptors, large scale painters, and architects would be facing. Your worries as a photographer would seem minor in comparison.

If for some reason you choose to post full resolution images, then you're giving people your full resolution images. My guess is there's less chance of people stealing them than of just choosing not to download the enormous things.

If you cripple the files with watermarks or other digital damage, then you're adding another layer of annoyance for your poor audience.

[Ed Richards]

Zoomify is honest about the problem:

How secure are my images with Zoomify?

Zoomify's zoom-and-pan viewing solution makes copying images much more difficult than other viewing alternatives. Zoomify is viewed using Flash Player and the Player does not present a right-click Save As option as is standard with any large image in a web page. Second, Zoomify's display approach uses many small pieces - like a mosaic. These image 'tiles' are downloaded only as needed, so the entire image at full resolution is not displayed at full resolution. Using 'screen shots' to capture an image would therefore require assembling many small images in a photo editor - an inexact and time consuming process.

It is important to note, however, that no image presented on the web can be completely protected - if you can see an image, the data is on your computer and it can be retrieved by someone sufficiently determined.

http://imagefolio.com/products/zoomify/faqs/

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Should you put all your images up in Zoomify? Putting aside security, at 1-2,000+ files per image you will get a data management nightmare for uploading unless you are directly connected to your server.

Is theft an issue? If you selling fine art prints, probably not - I do not see folks hacking images and setting up a fine art sales site, and galleries are unlikely to buy them. If you license high rez images to be used digitally, it is more of an issue. If you are famous and your images sell for a lot of money, you do not care about putting big images on the WWW.:-)

Part of the security is critical mass. There is not much on the WWW in zoomify that would motivate a hacker to build a good zoomify ripper. That could change, and if it does, folks using Zoomify would need to reevaluate their decision.

One major advantage of Zoomify is that your images are not automatically copied into the WWW archive systems or search engines. Once you publish any image on the WWW, you can assume that it is sucked into archiving systems, meaning you can never get it off the WWW.

Matt raises good points. I, and others, have been stymied by the problem of showing LF images on the WWW in an easy to view way that differentiates our work from digicam shots. It is probably worth the risk of losing a few images to help people understand the detail they will get in a large print.

[Martin D.]

This is not an imaginary problem. That is why someone invested time&effort to come up with a tool such as Zoomify. I guess, one only needs a few hours to write a script that can download a whole Zoomify picture. It is just a question of time till Google starts doing it for indexing purposes. These guys want to be in the possesion of everything that is digital.

Marketing LF photography is relatively costly. At the same time, the size of displays is gettting larger and larger. My current LCD is 1600x1200 pixels. The next one might be 6000x4000 pixels large (in 2-3 years). I think, the question how to present LF photos is very up-to-date. This is not an imaginary problem. In 2-3 years, a large portion of monitors/TVs could have a built-in automatic color calibration.

[starkhaze]

who are you expecting is going to steal your photos?

why do you care?

what do you think they'll do with them?

[Thebes]

Stealing pictures? Last I checked when my pictures are copied I still have the original, unlike when my bike got stolen back in college... I suppose it might marginally devalue one's work to have them copied a whole lot without one's consent.

I suppose the most likely devaluation would be someone using it for the web, in which case they will just "steal" the normal sized web image.

I suppose someone might download the full size file and print it. If they did they might have otherwise bought a print, so you might some day loose a sale this way. Some unscrupulous individual might print them and pass them off as his own work- that would be my biggest worry.

Zoomify seems to me to be reasonably "secure" in this case. If it takes a programmer a few hours to "steal" my image I really doubt they will bother. I doubt anyone would bother to purchase this program from another. I suppose that someone in Nigeria might one day write a script to "steal" my entire body of work and printing it with crap inks, sell it in some African art gallery catering mostly to other illegal hackers and the like.... oh well, seems low risk to me.

Thinking about this, half the photos I've seen on gallery walls in Taos were too far away (above other work mostly, or behind a sculpture, etc) for me to see the difference between LF and MF and sometimes even 35mm. Of course these galleries also have some dubious sounding things listed as the "media" of these works.

I don't foresee consumer level 6000x4000 displays. Really, not ever, they would cost too much and for most people offer too little in return. Same reason we don't see consumer MF digicams. My 15" lappy display is 1920x1200 and while my eyes (with glasses on) can read it comfortably, my wife squints and gripes when she uses it for web browsing.

[Jack Dahlgren]

I don't foresee consumer level 6000x4000 displays. Really, not ever, they would cost too much and for most people offer too little in return. Same reason we don't see consumer MF digicams. My 15" lappy display is 1920x1200 and while my eyes (with glasses on) can read it comfortably, my wife squints and gripes when she uses it for web browsing.

This thread is so dead I shouldn't comment on it, except to point out that a 45" diagonal screen (27"x 36") with the same pixel density as your laptop would be just about 6000x4000. You can already buy TV screens of that size for around $1000. So it is just a matter of time before we hit 6000x4000 in those sizes.