I had a colleague tell me that my pbase photos were "at risk" becasue they were too large and someone could steal them. My first reaction was to ask myself if I really cared if they were used commercially without my permission and I guess I didn't have the strong negative answer of most folks. Not that I want anyone to gain from my images but its not a big thing really.
Well I thought it over and decided to see if I could do something to make my images unusable. I tired water marks and © signatures and all. But I thought later about the following: A computer screen is very low resolution compared to a good quality printer. I save my images at 400dpi in Photoshop and they print so well that I can enlarge way beyond expectations most of the time. But a computer monitor displays at only 72dpi (maybe called ppi). So, why save files with as high quality as you can if you are only going to display them on the internet? In Photoshop the options when saving your psd file as a jpg gives you 12 quality ranges. I tried saving a 1000 pixel wide jpg at all 12 qualities and then looked at them in photoshop again. In fact I uploaded them here and looked at them too. The difference was almost impossible to see on the monitor. However when printed or zoomed in the difference was obvious. The low quality images showed a lot of checkerboarding when zoomed or printed. The high quality images did not.
So that's my experiment. I have no problem displaying 1000 pixel images from jpg file saved at the lowest quality possible becasue they are not usable in any way other than the size displayed. They simply cannot be enlarged or printed with quality.
Any thoughts?