Protect Your Flickr Images From Casual Piracy
Promoting yourself and your images on Flickr leaves you vulnerable to casual piracy — that is, anybody who views your images can also download them. This is Flickr’s default setting, so unless you change permissions explicitly, your images could easily be downloaded and used without your permission.
Flickr provides a setting to prevent downloading, but by default various sizes of your images are available for download.
When you prevent a user from downloading, you also disable Flickr’s link to multiple sizes of the image:
Flickr’s scripts then also disable saving the image on screen by “right-clicking” on the image and choosing a “save as” option — only a generic single-colour gif will be downloaded instead of the actual image.
To set the default downloading and viewing permissions:
- Once signed in to Flickr, click on your account name
- Click the Privacy & Permissions tab
- Click edit
From here you can select who you want, by default, to be able to see all sizes of and to be able download your images.
Create a “Friendly URL” To Make Getting To Your Photostream Easy
Flickr allows you to create a “Flickr Alias” which gives you a shorter URL to your photostream. To do this, first log into your Flickr account.
Click here to find the link and further information about creating a Flickr Alias.
http://flickr.com/YOURALIAS will now link to Flickr photostream.