Downsizing for webpage

[RandySmith]

The editor of my local paper announced last week that he is stopping printing of the local paper and going strictly "on-line" with news and sports. The good thing is that now my photo's will be in color opposed to b&w, the bad news is that at the current moment my photo's can be right-mouse clicked and saved to disk. The tech guru at my hosting website offered me some HTML that re-directs the viewer to my photo-album so they can order photos, however, all of the photo's in the photo-album are watermarked and the editor is opposed to having watermarks on the images.

I'm trying to figure out how to create reasonably acceptable images that will display well on a web-page, but if anyone right-mouse clicks the image to save the image all they will get is at best is a postage stamp size photo, otherwise it will be severly grainy and distorted if the image is enlarged.

Any suggestions in this regard would be appreciated.
Randy

[bpjones]

You aren't going to be able to stop people from saving your images to disk through html code or javascript. "Where there's a will there's a way."

However, you could do this. Make sure that your images are reduced in quality to 72ppi, which is the most that is necessary for online viewing. If somebody did download it, the quality would be such that it wouldn't have enough pixels to enlarge to a bigger size. For reference, most prints are made in the 240-300 ppi range.

From my experience, pictures that are part of online newspapers aren't hyperlinked anywhere and it never occurred to me to save them to my computer (even though I could.)

[Gordon]

Bryan's suggestions are good - as long as I can see an image on the screen, I can make a copy of it, trivially in a matter of seconds. Scripts that block right clicking don't work. Overlays don't work. Flash slideshows don't work. If you can see it, you can save it.

So you are left with two options. Obscure the image so much that it can't be saved cleanly (watermarks and other ways of corrupting the image). Those have the disadvantage of stopping people actually seeing the picture, which is likely why the paper doesn't like watermarks.

The second way is to make them small enough to be unprintable at anything above a 4x6 or 5x7 type of print. For that you want them saved around 640x480 type of resolution - as Bryan suggests, 72 pixels per inch, at whatever size they are being shown.

Just saving the file at 72ppi won't make it any smaller or more protected though, you need to actually resample it down to that size, 72dpi at the dimensions it'll be viewed it (ppi being a somewhat meaningless factor on its own)