Website Export Settings Lightroom...?

First - put your watermark on the photos. Assume that any photos you are putting up are being stolen and reused (and sold) by somebody else. Might as well make them work for it.

Second - do you have your model's permission to post their images to internet? Can you prove it? If any of them are minors, you will need their parent's/guardian's permission. You should have this permission in writing (even an email from them granting permission is better than nothing, if you can produce it when you need it.)

Permission is vital because.... see point one. If one of those photos is used in ways by somebody else that causes the model harm or embarrassment they may then turn around and claim that they never gave you permission, at which point the onus is on you to prove you had permission - that is.... they only need to claim - you need to prove.

Not having done anything to protect the images from mis-use (i.e. watermarks) will not help. Since images, once released to the internet, are effectively 'forever' consider what will happen if one of your models is up for a big gig in 5 years and their potential employer finds a purloined image of them that kills the job opportunity.

When you post very high quality photos, the risk of them being scooped increases.... which is why I am belabouring the point.

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If you are intending your audience to merely view the images on a computer monitor then you have two options, generally.

1) Export at 72dpi and resize the images (down) to fit a certain size. Say 5in by 7in or metric equivalent.

Or - you can just skip and step and resize to the max screen size - say 1024px by 700px - in which case you may need to set the dpi still, but it is redundant.

I display my images as JPGs saved at 95%. That teeny bit of loss of quality is not discernible by 99% of the people and saves a lot of space.

acearchie said:

Thanks for the info. I feel like the watermark thing is a difficult one as I really don't like their look on images and have yet to find a way to slip a watermark onto the shots without it detracting from the actual image. I do check tineye every so often to see if any of my shots have been picked up anywhere else but haven't seen any yet! I don't think they are of a high enough quality yet to be copy-catted.

For all the shots I now do as well as for the previous 6 months I have been getting model releases signed and have been storing them in my Dropbox for backup.

I think the sue culture is a lot more prevalent in the US but I like to know that I am in full right to post my images online.

At the moment I have been experimenting with having the long edge at 800px and quality at 85% but I will probably keep the long edge to 1024px as that does seem to make more sense!

Click to expand...

Sounds like you are in the right ball park, so to speak. I only skimmed your site, but I think your quality is bit better than you giving yourself credit for.

It is a sad truth, but being a 'professional photographer' is more about the paper work, the editing, and the organizing than the actual photo taking. Wait until you have customers you have to a) Get, b) convince you are worth paying, and then c) chase down for the payment.