ArtSites Updates

This week, I received a great question from Maureen Tracey:

There is a lot of lifting of artists’ images from the web now and I know the issue of watermarking our images on our websites has come up before but I would question doing it again.

Please comment.

Yes, Maureen is correct that this issue does seem to come up frequently.

In response to these inquiries, we've written a detailed blog post, Protecting Artistic Works on the Web

And, if you are concerned about this issue, you probably should really to take a read.

That said, we've also never heard from any of our 500+ artists about times when / where their artwork has been "lifted".

(Please note that watermarking is definitely a concern for photographers because their digital images ARE their artwork! And, many of our photographers do add watermarks before uploading their images to ArtSites. Or, they only upload lower resolution versions.)

(And, FYI - behind the scenes, we automatically create and use lower resolution versions of all files you upload to ArtSites. The images you see on your website are OUR processed, lower resolution versions. For the web and most screens, these images work perfectly fine, but if you were to print them at the size of your original, they would look fuzzy and quite bad. ;-)

In other words, for our 2D and 3D artists, the image anyone would get from your website is such low quality that it really cannot be blown up to compare with your original piece.

So, please note that the images shown on your website are NOT your original digital files!

Your original (hi-res) images are not displayed or available to any visitors on your website.

That said, a visitor could print out a image from your website, say less than 4" x 6".

However, we've found that many artists are less concerned about this kind of piracy.

Most artists seem more concerned with the potential piracy of full-sized, digital prints that could compete with their originals.

What About Adding a Watermarking Feature to ArtSites?
Unfortunately, there are no easy or inexpensive ways to add / integrate this functionality into ArtSites. (And, we've been looking for quite some time! :-)

it would take a significant amount of time to add this feature if we were to develop it ourselves.

One of the main complexities in creating a general watermarking feature is that most artists want to control exactly what, where and when these watermarks appear.

And, we have already received quite a bit of pushback / feedback from our artists about automating anything that changes how their images are viewed (or manipulated) on their website.

Naturally, this adds to the complexity of finding a suitable solution.

Maureen is correct that there is a lot of online discussion about images being lifted.

However, whenever we have tried to actually find data that backs up these claims, we cannot seem to find many (i.e. more than one or two) artists for whom this has been the case.

(Many "pirates" are looking for well-known, hi-res images / artists and want to print them at 18" x 24", or even larger.)

And, when we have heard artists talk about it, it was difficult to concretely know how much these activities negatively impacted their sales or reputation.

All this said, you still have options ... :-)

If you really want to add watermarks to your images, there are some really nice FREE online image editing tools that allow anyone to do this easily and quickly.

One example would be Picmonkey and here are a few tutorials on either creating or adding a watermark to your images.

Since adding a watermark is easy to do with many other free online tools (and every artist can control exactly when, where and what watermark appears ;-), we've decided to leave this feature up to our artists to do outside of ArtSites.

However, we are very interested in hearing your thoughts and feedback!

If you have any experiences or concerns to share, please let us know!

Thanks again for your understanding and happy watermarking! :-)