The birthday edition YAY, happy birthday to me. I will be breaking my sugar fast later on today and eating cake.
Good Morning Mud Slingers, how are you today? What have you been doing in your studios this week? Have you been plastering stuff all over the interwebs and have you worried that it will get pinched? Have you had whole pages of your blog, images included “scraped” and published onto a fake blog somewhere? Have you come across the darker side of the internet and been saddened that it isn’t all kittens and conversations?
Well you are not alone, this too has happened to me.
I first started Frogpondsrock back in 2007, the early posts of mine are terrible, full of ellipses and woeful sentence structure, but they tell a story so I leave them there and just ignore their existence.
I learned very early on that “scraping” was common. Advertising sites hosted offshore somewhere, would steal whole pages of content, images included, and bang them up onto their website. Some linked back to me, some didn’t but it was my words and images up there next to the virus laden flashing download now graphics.
At first it is a shock, I mean really, how rude. But basically there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I could waste time and energy tracking down their host and demanding a takedown that would probably not happen anyway and who has the energy for that? I certainly don’t.
So I chose to ignore the thieves of the internet and counted myself thankful that some of them linked back to my blog.
But because I choose to ignore the practice does not mean that I make it worthwhile for people to steal my stuff. I resize my images so that they look fabulous here on FPR but are next to useless if they are printed out.
I like large images, so I resize my images to 800 px on the longest side but really, 600 is plenty good enough for a blog post. You need to balance out the fact that you want people to look at your work, with making the image useless on paper.
I also do not waste time watermarking my images because I don’t like watermarks, they make a photo look messy and cluttered and distract my eye. Also watermarks are really easy to remove so to my mind that is a double waste of my time.
If you do not have a photo programme, Picasa is a good free one and I am sure there are many others. Ask your friends what they use, I use photoshop. Macs come with iPhoto already installed and so you don’t even have to do anything there at all.
A selection of the images I use on the blog are photos that I have shared on instagram first. Instagram automatically resizes the image to 640 x 640 and that makes it a nearly perfect size for a blog post. ( though it is too square for my aesthetic I like a landscape orientation)
This image was a quick snap for my records, taken with my camera and I resized it to 800 on the longest side. Normally I would then resize this again within the blog post so that it was easily viewable on any device but still large enough for a good look at the work if you click on the photo and open it up in a new window.
This next image is the same but resized to 600px
and this one is 400
600 is probably the best size to use as the image is small enough to be useless offline, it is small enough so that your blog loads quickly as large images really slow down the load time, but it is still large enough for people to view easily.
I hope that has helped a little bit but the rule of thumb that I follow in my online life is, if I put it onto the web I expect it to get pinched. I also work by the rule of not saying anything online that I wouldn’t want published on a billboard outside my place of work and as I work at home I do not want a billboard across the road flashing obscenities at me, unless I am really grumpy when in that case I will probably just nod at the billboard and say, “Kimmy you are a poet”.
Here is the image again, just how I like it best here.
The work featured in the photos is a woodfired platter by Lise Edwards, porcelain cups, rocks and bowl by Kim Foale, road kill quoll by Eve Howard and bird plate by Adriana Christianson.
Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.
Using the “Sunday Ceramics” title and photo I provided is OPTIONAL it is up to you.
Link back here to me.
Comments on this entry are closed.
Hi Kim, I hope you don’t mind my joining your Sunday Ceramics, have been trying to add something since you started but time kept slipping away. Have experienced problems adding my post today and it looks like it added twice, sorry.
Have a beaut day for your birthday. Annie
Not at all Annie it is lovely to have you. Time slips away from me as well. Rather quickly in fact 🙂
I resize to 700 on the long side and hope that’s small enough to be useless to anyone printing out and I have my blog name on them so if anyone does pinch them, maybe they’ll be kind enough to link back. I don’t know how to tell if anyone is stealing my stuff anyway.
Happy Birthday!
Thanks River, I generally have people tell me, unless I get a trackback
Frustrating but probably unavoidable situation in this age of extreme info sharing. I recently discovered someone had taken my written descriptions of my work and applied to her own in her etsy shop. I figure if someone hasn’t got the nous to describe their own artwork then they probably won’t get very far, even with the assistance of pinched text!
I am always amazed at the laziness of people, I mean how hard are descriptions to write? Boo to her, the kiln Gods notice these sorts of things you know 😉
PS Happy birthday Kim!
Thank you it has been a glorious day full of squirmy and talkative grandchildren, cups of tea, chocolates and divinely smelly soap 🙂
It’s very hard to keep control over you images. I’m a graphic designer (by day) and take copyright quite seriously. I like big bold images on my site even though I know that people copy images, (and I know watermarks are annoying and easily removed). I have come to the conclusion that my actual sculptural and pottery work is my actual work and have accepted that my images will be re-used by others (unlike photographic and illustrative works). I have grown fond of people re-pinning my images on their boards in pinerest and actually encourage it. Although my images are only ever at screen resolution and I always make sure my meta data has my info in it. Of course “scraping” is just wrong and for that I unfortunately have no answers 🙁
On a nicer note Happy Birthday! Sounds like you had a lovely day 🙂
Oh I take copyright very seriously as well Belin, I have just found that it is pointless to try and chase stolen images or text 🙂 I think that my work is strong enough to stand alone and be recognised as mine and I noticed your metadata when I did a test download of one of your images to check out their size *grins*
Pinterest is an interesting platform, I enjoy pinterest but have only just returned after the copyright issues of 2012. I don’t have the time to use pinterest effectively as a promotion tool so I ignore it. It is on my to do list. Thanks for joining in
happy Birthday Kim. Hope it was a lovely day..
thanks for the tips on what size image to use..
It was a GORGEOUS day Anna, we ate too much sugar (I feel very cloudy) and I set up large containers of water on the verandah for Evelyn to paddle in and we just sat in the shade and giggled with the baby all afternoon.
I post my images at a size I hope no one will reproduce. But as Belin says it’s my work and unless someone is copying my work I would tend to let it go. However, Etsy takes a very dim view of anyone stealing any sort of information. They like to be informed immediately of such goings on. Plagarism is plagarism, no matter how you dice it.
Your birthday sounds like a goodie!
I dislike people copying my work but not to the extent that I would make a big deal about it, I am too tired and jaded these days 🙂 Also I have found that those who are known to copy others work vigorously deny they are copying.
I hope it didn’t read as if I was condoning the practice of plagiarising any sort of content?
No, not at all. I was just saying that if any sort of plagarism takes place on Etsy, they like to know about it.
Thanks again for hosting Sunday Ceramics.
Oh Phew 🙂 and it is my pleasure to host the link up I enjoy the conversation. Oftentimes it is only by writing a blog post or a FB update that I will sort out what I “really” mean to be doing and get the ideas straight in my head. I miss the group environment of a shared studio space and so now I get that energy from you.
Lots of great info, many thanks for sharing! I hope your birthday was a great one! I have been lucky enough (or maybe blind to the use of..) but my images/content from my website and/or blog have yet to be pinched, copied, or infringed upon…At least to my knowledge. I do my best at keeping my images large enough so people can see the detail, but small enough to look crummy if printed out. I use Adobe Photoshop to edit my pictures, so they are good quality to start with (in case I want to use them in the future for a look book, or something else along those lines), but then change the DPI from 300 down to 72. So I have the original version, and the “web” version, as I label them. 🙂
Shawna
jsbarts.blogspot.com