high res photos now being displayed by wordpress without my consent
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Because of wordpress wishing to appeal to viewers with high resolution displays are all of the high resolution photos that I have personally sized down because I don’t want people to have access to my high res photos unless they pay for them, have now been made available by wordpress to just about anybody who wants to steal them? How in the world is this a good thing? And how can I opt out of wordpress circulating my photos in this way against my own personal security settings?
I have already sent an email asking why wordpress keep resizing my photos against my settings and have received no response. So please can you have the common decency to reply to this query as it seems that you also refuse to moderate this comment when I made it on the blog post announcing this new feature.
Blog url: http://zootsuiter.wordpress.com/The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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There is no way to disable that setting, but even prior to it there was always a way for users to simply download the full image by right-clicking it. This is common throughout any website.
In this case, I recommend just uploading lower resolution files, as they will not be expanded beyond their full size and downloading via conventional means will only produce the same lower resolution files.
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How can users download the full size image by right clicking it? I just tried to do it with some high res images that I’ve uploaded in the past (I’ve actually got over a year’s worth of high resolution images stored on my wordpress) and I couldn’t do it. When I tried to save the image on my hard drive all that I got was the smaller resized image.
What exactly is the point in having the option for users to resize their images if wordpress don’t respect these user settings?
I have over 365 high resolution images that I have uploaded to wordpress because I trusted them to respect my personal security settings. Are you now saying that wordpress have no obligation or desire to respect these settings?
You say that I can resize my images in the future which is what I’m doing now that I know how wordpress operate, but is it really a reasonable or fair request to ask me to now delete all my old images and upload resized images?
I’m really disappointed that wordpress are so blasé about something so important as the security of high resolution files. There are multi-million dollar stock agencies that make their money selling high resolution images, and now wordpress are happy to gift these high resolution images to anybody that wishes to uses them without the uploader’s consent.
This is seriously bad business practice, and I don’t think that it’s made clear in any documentation that I agreed to when signing up to wordpress.
Please let me know if I’m mistaken in this regard.
In the meantime I’ll be letting as many bloggers know as possible that wordpress have no respect for their settings or files and can do anything they want with them without the user’s consent and no opt out option.
Very bad form from wordpress, I’ll now be looking for somewhere else to host my site. Thanks for threatening my livelihood.
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We do respect your image settings, but they are scaled up to accommodate Apple’s new Retina Displays, which your images would essentially look horribly pixelated on.
Have you seen the details at http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/a-high-resolution-experience/ ?
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Yes, I have indeed, and I tried to comment on that post and my comment was refused moderation.
Please could you answer the questions that I asked in my post.
Where does it say in my user agreement that wordpress have free rein to resize and distribute my photos as they wish?
How in wordpress current settings when I have resized my images can people get the full size image by right clicking?
Are you still suggesting that the only way that I can remedy this is by deleting and resizing 365 photos?
And why are wordpress not respecting my copyright by not respecting my rights to disaply my images as I see fit?
I can understand that wordpress wish to appeal to peopel with high res displays, but why aren’t they respecting my settings and not giving me the option to opt out if that’s what I want?
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Where does it say in my user agreement that wordpress have free rein to resize and distribute my photos as they wish?
The would be covered by the Terms of Service.
“By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog.”
How in wordpress current settings when I have resized my images can people get the full size image by right clicking?
That would depend on how your images are initially displayed. For example:
http://galwayphotoblog.com/2012/07/28/daddy-long-legs-clinging-to-a-leaf/ right-click and choose save/download as.
http://galwayphotoblog.com/2012/08/03/fun-at-the-galway-races-2012/ click on any of the gallery photos, then either right-click as above or select “View Full Size” from the photo’s meta box.
Are you still suggesting that the only way that I can remedy this is by deleting and resizing 365 photos?
In order to accommodate Retina screens (so your images aren’t pixelated), we show the largest possible uploaded file. In order to limit that, you would need to have uploaded smaller files essentially.
And why are wordpress not respecting my copyright by not respecting my rights to disaply my images as I see fit?
We respect your copyright and would never claim ownership of your photos or use them in our own marketing materials and such, but changes to how your photos are displayed on your blog are still covered by the terms of service that you agreed to when signing up as mentioned above.
why aren’t they respecting my settings and not giving me the option to opt out if that’s what I want?
I understand that you aren’t happy about this and have made a note to see if we can add the ability to turn off support for retina displays on a per-blog basis, but I can’t say if or when that will be done.
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Firstly, thanks for responding to my questions in such a full and relatively speedy manner.
However, I still see quite a number of problems in the responses that you have offered me.
You draw attention to the terms that automattic offer bloggers by quoting this-
“By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog.”
Can you explain to me how automattic resizing my pictures against my wishes is considered to be reproducing, modifying, adapting, and publishing my content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog?
You are not promoting my blog by modifying my content in order to appeal to apple users with retina displays. Instead you are clearly promoting apple at the expense of my content. In the article that you drew my attention to- http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/a-high-resolution-experience. There is a link to an apple store locator and also another link to mac world where people can shop around for apple products.
This seems a clear attempt to market apple products at the expense of my rights as owner of the content that you are modifying in order to appeal to mac users.
It also says in the terms of service that- “Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your site as possible”. Can you please tell how going against my own personal display settings for my photos is in any way striving to give me as much control over what goes on my site as possible?
What is the point of allowing users to resize their photos and giving them the illusion of having control over their content, only to then supersede users’ settings in order to sell wordpress to retina display users?
Next you outline the process of how to access my high res photos by right clicking on a photo. Unfortunately none of these examples actually succeed in displaying my high res photos.
As I have already stated I have started uploading photos in low res formats for the past month or so because I am running low on free space in wordpress.
Can you please demonstrate how you can access my high res photos in any of my older photos when I was uploading photos of 4200 pixels on their longest side. Here is one such photo- http://galwayphotoblog.com/2011/12/21/golden-johann-strauss-in-vienna/photo133/. I have resized this photo to 850 pixels at its longest side from a high res size of 4 times this length. Please show me how you can access my high res version of this image by right clicking on it.
You also say- “In order to accommodate Retina screens (so your images aren’t pixelated), we show the largest possible uploaded file. In order to limit that, you would need to have uploaded smaller files essentially.”
This seems extremely unfair to me. At the time I uploaded photos in high res format I did so because I trusted wordpress to host my content without altering them to suit their own needs. Now, as a result of wordpress’s wish to satisfy apple users at the expense of their bloggers, I now have to retrospectively delete all of my photos from my site. Does that strike you as just?
I sell stock photos through alamy, it can cost people thousands of pounds to buy my pictures through alamy stock images. Automattic have now decided to allow access to these images to anyone with a high res display. This now puts me in breach of alamy’s contributor’s contract and subject to penalties and the cessation of my contract.
How many other photographers contribute to your site on a daily basis in the same situation who you are now short-changing along with anyone who has ever had to pay for their high resolution photos?
Perhaps wordpress doesn’t realise the fact, but once photographers cop on to how you are misusing their images, I’m sure that you can expect to see a hell of a lot of wordpress contributors abandoning the site.
I personally intend to tell as many people as possible, and I’m sure that many angry photographers will follow suit.
WordPress relies on their contributors trusting them with their content, automattic have now utterly breached that trust in order to market apple products and sell themselves to retina display users.
I won’t stand for this as it is a clear breach of automattic’s own terms and conditions, and I’m sure that many other bloggers on wordpress feel the same way.
Shame on automattic for completely disregarding the rights and wishes of the people who make their company what it is.
Automattic also state in the their terms that:
“Automattic reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any part of this Agreement. It is your responsibility to check this Agreement periodically for changes. Your continued use of or access to the Website following the posting of any changes to this Agreement constitutes acceptance of those changes.”
What kind of a shady company has such a ridiculous clause in it’s terms and conditions, which basically makes the whole agreement that contributor’s sign up to completely worthless since it can be changed at the whims of automattic without even requiring its users to agree to anything.
It’s definitely time bloggers woke up to what a rotten deal they are getting at wordpress, which is amply demonstrated by how you are rolling out this supposedly great feature, which is really just a pathetic fawning excuse to sell wordpress to macbook retina display users.
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Can you explain to me how automattic resizing my pictures against my wishes is considered to be reproducing, modifying, adapting, and publishing my content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog?
Out of that section, resizing to accommodate users with Retina Displays (who would see incredibly pixelated images without) would be considered “. . . modifying . . . solely for the purpose of displaying . . . your blog”
When I go to http://galwayphotoblog.com/2011/12/21/golden-johann-strauss-in-vienna/photo133/ the highest I get is 850 x 573, which is the highest that will be displayed, as the actual file is no larger. How are you getting a larger image than that?
Also, the portion of the TOS stating that the agreement may change is industry-standard across most most web services.
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I can’t help but admire the way you so selectively pick and choose what aspects of my responses you choose to answer and which you choose to ignore in order to defend the indefensible.
However, this method of argument is easy to find holes in as well. You explain that-
“Out of that section, resizing to accommodate users with Retina Displays (who would see incredibly pixelated images without) would be considered “. . . modifying . . . solely for the purpose of displaying . . . your blog”
Note the word solely, not in addition to. You may say you are resizing my images against my will so they will display properly to a tiny proportion of visitors to my blog who use a retina display, but I think I have amply demonstrated that this goes alongside your fawning attempts to market apple products, even going as far to provide 2 seperate links to sites that help visitors to source and buy their products. Please justify how this kind of marketing is covered in the terms of the agreement that I consented to by blogging on wordpress?
I will also restate that automattic say that- “Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your site as possible”. Can you please explain how resizing my images against my will is giving me as much control as possible?
You also say that you can’t access my high res version of johann strauss, but I can assure you that I uploaded a high res version that I have resized.
I could restore the original image so that you can see the photo at its full high res size, but when I have done this with other photos wordpress has stopped me from reversing the process again. This leaves me with a high resolution photo that I must then delete if I don’t want anyone to have access to it. This has happened with this photo already tonight http://galwayphotoblog.com/2011/12/31/face-in-the-fountain/.
This whole argument has rested on the fact that you said that people have access to my high res images by right clicking on my images and saving them. You have not shown this to be the case.
If this is not the case, and retina display users still won’t have access to my original high res images before i resized them then I suppose that we’ve wasted a lot of time arguing about something that won’t be the case.
If it is the case though, please clarify if I have to delete all of my original high res images to maintain the security of my photographic work.
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We are not marketing towards Apple products, we are providing support for their higher resolution displays, much in the same way that providing support for Internet Explorer is not marketing for Microsoft.
I do apologize that this is not working out for you, but any change to this will not be immediate.
Though I only recommend it as a last resort, you may want to use the self-hosted WordPress software on your own hosting provider. This will give you much more control over your content.
To do this, you’ll need to install WordPress from http://wordpress.org/ on a hosting provider. We have some recommendations at http://get.wp.com/hosting/
Once that’s done, you can move your content following this guide: http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-wordpress-org
To clear up any confusion, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two different entities.
http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/WordPress.org has complete support and documentation sites for self-hosted/installed versions of WordPress at:
http://wordpress.org/support/
http://codex.wordpress.org/ -
Well I suppose that we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I can’t really see how you can argue that providing links to sites where you can buy apple products, alongside an article celebrating how great retina display is, can be considered to be anything but marketing for apple. But nonetheless, it’s apparent to me that this argument isn’t going anywhere, and I’ll just have to move my site elsewhere.
I already have a self hosted wordpress.org site at zootimaging.com and I’ve already tried to export the xml file for my site at galwayphotoblog.com over there. Yet I continually get an internal server error whenever I assign an author and try and download all the attachment files to wordpress.org site, do you have any idea why this is continually the case?
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That would be an issue with your self-hosted blog, which we can’t really provide support for.
Support for WordPress.org blogs is offered at http://wordpress.org/support/ and if you post there the folks should be able to help you.
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