Photo portfolio

  • Unknown's avatar
    mauijojokat · Member ·

    Hello, I am building a photography page. My questions –
    1.) What is the best way to prevent my photos being downloaded easily e.g. right click to save photo or even, right click somewhere to download my complete website?
    2.) For slideshow > photo setting, is medium size or full size the best? I’m seeing it through a laptop, the screen is rather small, it seems medium size is enough. However, for those with a large monitors viewing my website, shall I set it in full size for a better quality?
    3.) Is the slideshow in fixed size? I want it bigger, almost taking a full screen view, to show my photos as big as possible, is it possible?
    4.) How to strike a balance between better photo quality and protect my photos from being downloaded/ copied/ stolen?

    Thank you very much for your help…

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to moderators and staff)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    1.) What is the best way to prevent my photos being downloaded easily e.g. right click to save photo or even, right click somewhere to download my complete website?

    Short answer: there’s no way to prevent this. If you publish anything online, it can, and will, get copied.

    Longer answer: at best you can make it a bit harder for people – on our Pro plan you’d be able to install a plugin that disables the browser’s right-click menu, but it’s ridiculously easy to get around that, and all it will really do is make visitors frustrated because your site is deliberately breaking their browsers, and make your site inaccessible to disabled people who use assistive technology to browse the internet.

    More effective options is to add watermarks to your images, don’t upload high-res images (i.e. upload images only at the size they’ll actually display on the site – a 800px image is much less useful to a content thief than a high-res 2000px+ image), and have a clear copyright notice on your site.

    Those still won’t prevent people downloading the images, but they will make your images less appealing to content thieves, and should give the ignorant who believe because it’s online it means it’s free, some pause :)

    https://wordpress.com/en/support/prevent-content-theft/

    2.) For slideshow > photo setting, is medium size or full size the best? I’m seeing it through a laptop, the screen is rather small, it seems medium size is enough. However, for those with a large monitors viewing my website, shall I set it in full size for a better quality?

    If the slideshow is the post, rather go with large. Smaller sizes are good if the slideshow appears somewhere in a mostly-text post, so it enhances the post rather than taking over. But if you want the images to be front-and-center, bigger is better :)

    The slideshow will automatically adjust on smaller screens so the images aren’t bigger than the screen they’re being viewed on, and regardless of your size settings, the images won’t be displayed bigger than the content area available in your theme.

    3.) Is the slideshow in fixed size? I want it bigger, almost taking a full screen view, to show my photos as big as possible, is it possible?

    The only limit is the width of the content area of your theme. The slideshow you have at the top of your front page is as big as it can get with this theme.

    If you switch to one of our newer block themes, you’ll be able to set the block to the full-width or wide-width alingments, which makes it wider than the content area. But just be careful with that – on wider screens that could lead to a situation where the image is blown up to the full width of the screen, but that causes the image to not fit horizontally.

    4.) How to strike a balance between better photo quality and protect my photos from being downloaded/ copied/ stolen?

    I touched on this in 1) above…

    Keep in mind that there’s a limit to the size your photos can be displayed at, and that limit is the size of the computer screen someone is viewing your site on. By far the most visitors to your site will be on mobile phones and tablets, so fairly small screens. And of desktop users, very few people will have large/ultrawide monitors.

    So on average the maximum size at which most screens will display your site is between 1500 and 2000 px wide, though depending on your theme this will likely be even smaller. For the Sketch theme you have at the moment the content area is on 764px wide, and the max width for featured images is 1092px wide.

    You’re not always going to use the same theme, so to build in some future proofing, resize your images to between 1500 and 2000px wide before uploading them. That’s still plenty big enough so people will be able to see smaller detail, but without it being possible to download and re-use the images as studio-quality reproductions.

    As an added benefit, this will also save storage space on your site – a 4000px JPEG image can be anything from 5MB to 13 MB big. The same image resized to 1500px brings the filesize down to well below 1MB, meaning your free space in the media library will last much longer.

    You can further conserve storage space by using built-in compression tools in software like Lightroom, or an app like JPEGMini, to further reduce the filesize of your images without any noticeable loss in quality.

    You can find more info on this topic here:

    https://wordpress.com/en/support/media/image-optimization/

    I hope that answers all your questions, but let me know if you have any others :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    mauijojokat · Member ·

    Thank you Kokkieh and everyone. I’m glad that this forum is actually very helpful. It is a great fuel for me to build my site :)

    1.) As I believe my future computer buying and my potential visitors will fall in the range between 13inch macbook and 24inch imac users, for these kinds of screen, [please advise the best media setting to adjust below?]
    (the number is the current values)
    (Do I need to leave some rooms for the image size for future optimise viewing, as currently technology improves rapidly, screen is great quality, I dont want my site looks old too soon….T-T)

    Thumbnail size Width 150 Height 150
    Medium size Max Width 300 Max Height 300
    Large size Max Width 1024 Max Height 1024

    2.) [Can I not adjust the image size beforehand, but let the media uploader and the media setting do it for me?]
    (I understand that it will take a longer upload time. other than that, is it good?)

    3.) Thank you for looking into my site. I have built the layout and site structure, that means my layout will very likely be this way, the only thing is to upload photos. I use all “blank pages” to establish pages and all “slideshows” to display photos. In my case (between 13inch macbook and 24inch imac visitors) [what is the largest image size in width, length and px I shall resize], to retain the photo quality and viewing experience, but much less useful to a content thief, if I have to do it in Lightroom/ Paint?
    (I will follow your advise to add watermark too).

    I am ok with camera equipment but not the software knowledge part, including px, image size, best optimize for web. T-T sorry

    Great great thanks, I am so glad that helpful staff are here. :) ^^

  • Unknown's avatar
    mauijojokat · Member ·

    Thank you for the details and useful information! I have read it several times and will need some times to digest….. on the below

    //If you switch to one of our newer block themes, you’ll be able to set the block to the full-width or wide-width alingments, which makes it wider than the content area. //

    How do I know which themes offer wider blocks? If I customize or adopte my site, some contents might have lost, I’m not dare to try everything… Any theme names advise?

    Once again, thank you very much for your help.

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-heroponriki · Member ·

    As I believe my future computer buying and my potential visitors will fall in the range between 13inch macbook and 24inch imac users, for these kinds of screen, [please advise the best media setting to adjust below?]

    It’s not as simple as that; the screen resolution of the computer will also come into play. People with the same iMac computer could have their screen resolution at wildly different sizes, so there isn’t a “best setting” to advise. I would recommend leaving them as-is and adjusting them if you feel they’re too big/too small.

    Also, it’s very difficult to “future proof” your site – with technology advancements, you would still need to modify and tweak your site as those things change and improve.

    [Can I not adjust the image size beforehand, but let the media uploader and the media setting do it for me?]
    (I understand that it will take a longer upload time. other than that, is it good?)

    Free WordPress.com sites have a media library upload limit of 3.0 GB, so uploading the full image will consume more of your storage. Currently, you’ve used 32% of your media library storage. If you don’t want to pay for an upgrade to increase your storage, optimizing and resizing the images prior to upload will be the best way to avoid that.

    I recommend reading this support document about image optimization to learn more: https://wordpress.com/support/media/image-optimization/

    How do I know which themes offer wider blocks?


    @kokkieh     was referring to sites that use the new Full Site Editor (FSE). Note that switching to a different theme would mean you would start over from a customization standpoint.

    For themes that have the FSE feature, you can review the different options on the themes page.

    If you’re happy with your current theme, I would just work with the content width area you have now and focus on adding great content. :)

    While we’re happy to help with questions you may have, we are limited to how much customization support we can provide. We also have some great webinars that can help you learn more about building your site and if you join the live webinar, you can also ask the presenter questions. You can find those here: https://wordpress.com/webinars/getting-started-website-building-101/

    I hope that helps!

  • The topic ‘Photo portfolio’ is closed to new replies.