Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part I)

From my perspective, one of the more exciting aspects of modern photography is the ability to quickly and easily share photos via the magic of the internet.  It's also a bit frightening.  Don't get me wrong--I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of my mother) wants to steal a picture of me making funny faces while I drink Belgian beer in an unremarkable restaurant.  I also suspect that, for the most part, if someone were inclined to swipe a photo or two, it would most likely be to use as a desktop background or some other innocuous purpose.  However, as I've started trying to sell my photographs (I have to fund my hobby somehow, after all), I've been advised by multiple sources that, in order to protect myself from piracy, I need to take some defensive action.  Rather than learning the art of swordplay, I've been researching how to watermark or resize images.  I've provided an examples of resizing here--the first photos on this blog, incidentally.  Watermarking will be covered in "Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (PartII)".  Being a poor, unemployed, recent graduate student, I am not really in a position to spend oodles of cash on editing software for my photographs--as such, I've been learning to use Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) for my editing needs.  More on editing software later.

So, what's up with this resizing business?  A quick Google search for "resize photos" will turn up hundreds of websites offering to quickly and easily resize your images.  However, as part of this whole learning to do things myself thing, I've read a fantastic tutorial on how to resize images in Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Lite_Quickies/).  You can see the results below.  So, I've explained why resize--to make it more difficult for some malicious person to come along and steal your hard work (and, by the way, this is also a handy trick if your photo is too large to send via e-mail or you're working on a website and you're not happy with how long an image takes to load).  But I haven't yet explained how/why it solves the theft issue.  So, here goes.

You probably already know that when you buy a new digital camera, one of the important specs you will want to consider is the megapixel resolution, with a higher megapixel resolution resulting in a higher quality image.  What you may not know is why megapixels matter.  In simple terms, a digital image is composed of a bunch of squares of color, or pixels.  However, each pixel contains only one color.  So, you can easily imagine that the size and number of pixels in the image will drastically change the quality of the image--where you have a large number of very small squares, the squares will appear to blend seamlessly, and you will see the sum of the squares as an image; where you have a small number of large squares of color (pixels), your eye will detect the squares, and the image will look blocky (a very technical term here, obviously).  Now, thinking back to high school geometry for a moment, to find the area of a rectangle, we multiply length x width, right?  Typically pixels in an image are measured per inch, so to find the pixels per inch, we multiply the number of pixels across that inch by the number of pixels down--the number of pixels in the whole image can then be calculated by multiplying the pixels per inch by the number of inches in the photo.  The term megapixel just means one million pixels--so a six megapixel camera will produce an image with 6 million pixels (of course, there is a lot more nuance to be discussed here, and different settings on cameras will produce different resolutions, but hopefully this discussion is sufficient to establish why pixels matter).  Generally, the larger you want your print/digital image to be, the more (and smaller) pixels you need to hide the fact that the image is really just made of a bunch of squares of color.

That's all well and good, but at this point I'm sure you're wondering how all of this talk of pixels relates to the issue at hand--that of how to prevent the theft of digital images.  Well, if I use my 6.1 megapixel camera to take a photograph and I slap that photograph online without resizing the image, you can easily download the image and produce a print that is just as high quality as the one I could print myself.  However, if I resize the photo by reducing the number of pixels, I'm throwing away some of the information in the photograph so that if you try to print the photo, you will end up with an ugly, blocky image instead of a nice, seamless, high quality image.  Of course, this also limits the size of the image I can post on the website without it starting to look blocky.  I'll close with a word to the wise: as a general rule of thumb, I NEVER alter my original images--and this is especially important for resizing.  Always save a copy of the image--if you save only the resized images, you cannot just go back and add those pixels you threw away.  They are gone forever.  I strongly recommend saving a copy and resizing the copy.  One final note: the dimensions you ultimately decide on (i.e. how small you resize the image) is entirely up to you--the smaller you make it, the worse it will look if someone tries to steal and enlarge the image.  However, you still want your photo to look good online, right?  So play around with the dimensions and find what works best for your needs.  Happy swashbuckling!

Just to give you an idea, this photo is 500x750 pixels, resized from 2048x3072.  The photograph was taken from a window in the Louvre in November 2004 at sunset.