It鈥檚 almost pass茅 to use the phrase 鈥渨e now live in a digital world鈥, like we don鈥檛 already know that.
In this futuristic age where we can watch the , and even , it鈥檚 hard to not get frustrated with the parts of our life that haven鈥檛 quite caught up yet. Why do Olympic athletes still have to pin flappy bits of paper to their chests with their numbers on? Why are there still pay phones everywhere? Why can鈥檛 someone fully solve the problem of photography infringement?
OK, that last one might be a bit niche to our industry, but it鈥檚 a valid question. No-one has yet come up with the silver bullet to defeat the problem once and for all.
Each agency tackles the issue of infringement differently. At 17吃瓜在线, we try to strike the right balance between keeping things as frictionless and simple as possible for our customers at the same time as protecting our photographers images from potential misuse. We track our user activity, use watermarks and work closely with the clients who download our images.
But what should you do about this on your own portfolio site? One solution might be to use the .PXLR image format from Pixelrights.
With SmartFrames the image is served as an encrypted data stream which is scrambled and unreadable to any traditional software. When the image is requested that data stream is decrypted in the viewer鈥檚 browser using a shared key. The image is then reconstructed on the page. All this happens instantly and with no loss of performance or speed over a JPEG. Interactive content, watermarks, credit & caption information and sharing tools can all be added simultaneously.
Here’s an example of a SmartFrame .PXLR image being displayed. Left and right click to see it in action.
Luke Vines, Operations Director for SmartFrame at Pixelrights says:
鈥One of the key tenets for SmartFrame is that it allows an image to be easily shared but in a controlled way that retains the connection with the source website / photographer. In the first instance, the image is made difficult to steal from the webpage, and not without it first being made very clear that the image itself is copyright material. It is however still absolutely possible, and indeed we encourage people to share the image via various social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter) or via an embeddable link. In this way we ensure that the image will still always link back to the originating website respecting the provenance and copyright in the image but not preventing it being shared.鈥
For more information or to arrange a demo, please contact:
Luke Vines: luke.vines@pixelrights.com / +44 (0) 7880 713037
Rob Sewell: robert.sewell@pixelrights.com / +44 (0) 7583 920087