Stop Facebook from printing your photos!

There has been more controversy lately regarding Facebook and their image ownership policies. A number of companies, such as Wal-Mart, Target and Snapfish have started making it extremely easy to print any of your photos directly from Facebook. And by “your” I mean, of course, everything you have uploaded to Facebook or any photo in which you were tagged.

Of course, the average person will welcome this particular bit of technical innovation, but for us photographers it may cause much consternation. Every photo we don’t print for our clients is lost revenue. Granted, I doubt any pro photographer with half a mind is uploading very large images to their Facebook profile/page in the first place, and with Facebook’s reputation with poor image quality in the first place there will be a big issue with print quality. There is also the hope in that at least one company with a Facebook connection – Wal-Mart – will reject printing any image with a watermark. I already watermark any image I post online, and I strongly suggest all photographers follow this practice regardless of any issues such as this.

The good news is that you can opt out of allowing your images being printed by these companies. Simply follow the links below to each companies’ Facebook application and click the link below the profile image that reads, “block application.” It’s that simple. Of course, this mostly likely will not work for any image in which you tagged someone and they are using it for their profile image, and it may not work if someone is tagged at all. It is my understanding that Facebook makes a copy of the image you upload for inclusion on the tagged person’s profile. I cannot test this theory, but I would love to hear from anyone who can.

The bottom line is this: Any time you post one of your images online, you run the risk of someone stealing your image for their own use. Furthermore, no amount of safeguards you use can prevent image theft no matter what people tell you. Not that you shouldn’t post any images online, because the web plays an obvious vital role in finding new clients. However, there are steps any professional or amateur photographer can take to make it difficult for anyone to print any of your photos from the web:

• Keep your images below 600 pixels on the longest side. This will prevent making prints much larger than 4×6 without a significant loss of detail.
• Save your images as jpegs with a compression quality of “medium,” or less than 50. The low quality is not too noticeable on your screen but will result in a poor quality print.
• Use a watermark that is large enough to cover a fair amount of the image. If it’s too small it can be cropped out without losing any vital parts of the image.

If you wish to protect your Facebook images from being printed, simply follow the links below and click the “block application” link below the profile image. Happy blocking!

Wal-Mart
Target
Walgreens
Snapfish
Shutterfly
Pixable
Kodak Easy Share

Do you know of any other companies providing similar “services” on Facebook? Do you have experience using one of these services for printing Facebook images? Let me know in the comments!

Tags: 3rd party printing, Facebook, Kodak Easy Share, Pixable, proofs, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Business, For Photographers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.