Printing & Copying

by: Mike

Sonia Zjawinski of The New York Times’ blog Gadget Wise caused a firestorm by advising readers to print photos from Flickr for decorating their houses. Photographers were angry and responded with some really nasty (and some fairly threatening) comments about how she was advocating theft of copyright protected material.

While this might be an understandable reaction to a poorly thought out decorating suggestion, the real issue here is actually that what Sonia Zjawinski has suggested is neither against Flickr’s terms of service nor is it illegal.

Everyone likes to share photos but you should beware when you put your photos online. If ownership and copyright are important to you, please make sure to read the terms of service of the sharing site you use. Flickr is considered a publicly accessible area and makes no claims of keeping your photos safe from misuse.

For photographers who want to make their images public and want to prevent abuse, you can use a service to protect and enforce your copyright, such as Image Span, but this service costs money.

If free is more your price range, you can use this handy Photoshop trick that I used at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for their online sketchbook collection (after the jump):

1. Open the image you want to share in Adobe Photoshop.

2. From the Image menu , select Image Size

3. Resize the image by first lowering the resolution (pixels per inch).

Usually you would never want to lower the pixels per inch of your image because it decreases the image quality… but this is precisely my goal. I want to show my picture, but I don’t want Sonia Zjawinski to be able to print it.

Most printers require an image of at least 150 ppi to make a photo quality print. Monitor resolution is 72 ppi, but you can usually make a pretty good print from this resolution, too. So, in this example I have lowered the resolution to 32 ppi.

The photo is too low quality to make a good print. You can see from this detail that it is severely pixelated:

But, the picture still looks pretty good on screen:

Ok, so I said that this was a free trick, and no, Adobe Photoshop is not free. Here are two free options that you may be able to use to lower pixels per inch: IrfanView and Gimp.