The Posterous team really needs to get their Twitter/Facebook login working for comments on iOS devices. Tried both to leave a comment on the page but kept getting a "we think this is spam" error. Guys, if I'm giving you an email address and two different oauth logins that are validated, it's probably not spam.
Anyway, here's the comment:
Flash does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from saving copies of images. With basic knowledge of using the developer tools built into any modern browser, it's easy to see the urls being loaded for any resource on a page.
Some photographers have this fear of their images being copied. They spend way too much time concentrating on it. What any successful photographer can tell you is that most of your time is spent being a business person, not snapping the shutter. You make money by marketing yourself and growing your business, not policing the entire internet for errant copies of a photo.
> Flash does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from saving copies of images.
This is only true if Flash is loading external jpegs. If they're embedded in a swf, you would have to go through a great deal more trouble to extract image files. But a right-click 'Save image as' is about all the trouble that most people are willing to go through, and as such, I'd guess that Flash is an effective deterrent much of the time.
I know a few photographers and illustrators, and based on what I hear from them, there is a shockingly pervasive attitude that any image on the web can be appropriated for any reason whatsoever. Even corporate types who should know better think nothing of grabbing images from portfolio sites (or flickr) to use in marketing campaigns, etc. I think it's wise for photographers to do what they can to protect their business and their work.
Also, consider the audience. Often portfolio sites exist solely to impress art directors at ad agencies, who (in my experience) aren't as hostile to flash as, say, developers at startups. And clumsy animated or skeuomorphic interfaces are often totally acceptable in that world. Many of them are still building flash 'microsites', after all. Real sales and commerce are taking place elsewhere (corbis, veer, getty images, et al).
This is beyond most people's capabilities; most people are thwarted by "right clicking is not allowed". (Do browsers let sites disable right-click anymore? I don't think so. But there was a time when they did.)
Someone should make swfextract a browser extension.
I'm working on it. Did you know there's a thing called Emscripten? My dream usecase is I'm out and about, and I need to look up a restaurant's website and OH SHIT IT'S IN FLASH. no worries. [swfextract bookmarklet]. Weee there's all the content. YAY
I guess it wouldn't be so easy if the photo is bigger than the screen. But if they are so worried about people copying their photos, they're probably using a scaled-down version.
I run an online portfolio service FolioHD (http://foliohd.com) and we get that question a lot: "Can people steal my pictures?" We've gone the extra mile to make sure saving pictures is a lot harder than a right-click and Save As, but it seems like lot of people don't even bother trying that first before asking. All the while, a simple screen capture of whatever you're looking at is just as easy, yet no one seems to know about that trick. The assumption is that Flash is safe, but not even Flash can protect against a simple screen capture.
Not trying to be a negative Nancy, but I just went to your site, clicked the 'live site' link to the 'Gooley' gallery, right clicked the image and 'saved as', and it worked.
I even checked to see that the downloaded image matched what I saw on my screen.
Is it supposed to do something else?
For the record, I'm using Chrome on Ubuntu, but I also tried it with Chrome and Windows and got the same results.
I am a photographer and have run into a secondary problem that results from blocking the easy means of saving an image. Most of our clients just want to share an image on Facebook and more than a couple have then just used their camera phones to snap a picture and post that, complete with motion blur and all.
Anyway, here's the comment:
Flash does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from saving copies of images. With basic knowledge of using the developer tools built into any modern browser, it's easy to see the urls being loaded for any resource on a page.
Some photographers have this fear of their images being copied. They spend way too much time concentrating on it. What any successful photographer can tell you is that most of your time is spent being a business person, not snapping the shutter. You make money by marketing yourself and growing your business, not policing the entire internet for errant copies of a photo.