Selling photos online

[selo]

Hi,

We started selling our photographs online, the way it works is like this.

The customers chooses a plan, this plans includes X number of digital images. After the photoshoot we put all retouched/edited photos online (30 ish) in a password protected area. The customer can login and pick the photos they want or buy extra.

My question is, what is the best way to protect the images from being stolen?

I use a plugin that lets me publish directly from lightroom. At this moment i protected the images with a pretty big watermark (at opacity 55) in the middle of the image. I also reduced the quality of the image to 75%, might even go lower to 50.

Is this a good way to protect the images? I have read that disable right click menu is not the best thing you can do, but i don't really understand why. Most people do not know how to save an image without right click, so by disabling that option we can at least stop them from trying to steal and remove the watermarks with a watermark remover.

Even if they do remove the watermark, they will end up with a bad picture with low resolution. But some will be happy with a thumbnail size image and even print them out.

 

[AceCo55]

My gut reaction is "you can't" ... you can do what you are doing so that they can only get their hands on a low-res image.
Me?: 1200px that only shows 1024px or less on my website, saved for web at medium compression, bevelled watermark slap bang in the middle with four diagonal lines radiating out (fade 40%), right click disabled.
People are still excited to show me my watermarked images on their phones!!! ... or on their Facebook page!!
I have accepted this and am OK if that's all they are doing (because essentially I can't actually do anything to stop the practice!)
But I'm all ears if some one chimes in with something more effective.

 

[Overread14 2]

You can't.

Screenshots, right clicking, photoshopping - you can use things like blocking right clicking, fancy flash slideshows, overlays and watermarks but in all honesty they only restrict and don't prevent. They'll stop your casual user, but people are getting very tech aware now so its harder and harder.

Using small sizes for viewing and a watermark is a good way to limit and restrict at least what they can do. The other is to sell prints directly; to have a viewing time and show them the photos in person (tablets are good for this) and have them choose then. That way you can pitch your sales direct.

It depends though on what kind of shooting you do - event shooters are oft limited unless they have assistants on site with them to process and advertise whilst they shoot; if they are alone then an online gallery is oft the only way.


Another is to increase your sitting/booking fee and profit off that and have sales as a smaller part of the setup ;present and important and 100% valid but not where you're making your bread and butter earning.

 

[selo]

I agree with both of you.. we do potrait photography mainly newborn, baby's weddings etc.

Having a higher booking fee is not a good option for us atm. Our portfolio needs to be bigger and there are many competitors within our area.

Selling offline is a very good idea.. I was thinking of sending people a print out of alle the pictures in small thumnails and they can just cross the ones they want and send it back to us. Tablet is a good option as well, but only if they are willing the visit the studio again. Some customers travel from far.

I have looked into this matter more, i decided not to disable right click since they can make screenshots etc. Instead i lowered the resolution to 840 width and the jpg quality to 60%... + a big watermark in the middle.. the images appear fine on the browser but when you save it you get 100-200kb file and very poor quality when you zoom in. Not worth trying to remove watermark with this picture.

I also tryed printing this image, and all the stores report poor quality for 4 by 6 inch print. Very happy with this setup now.

But i can still imagine people saving the picture and show it to tohers, while the big watermark is still there

 

[Overread14 2]

Yep and you can't stop that - but you can.

One idea- have a professional facebook account (ergo not your own name, your company name) and when you have new clients add them to your professional facebook profile (you can use this to communicate with them; show deals; etc..). Heck just having a once a month discount offer for one session on the FB profile might be enough to get many ready to accept friending/watching it.

Then you can watch them too - if the put up a photo of yours with the big watermarks on and such you've got them. Now you can be all legal and threaten, but chances are that won't win you friends. Instead you could reply along the lines of "I see that you're using the photo we took at your last session on your Facebook; If you like when you come to collect/order your prints I can sell you a copy ready for facebook as well; it won't have the watermark and will look really great as your profile picture! It will only cost (insert fee) but if you order (insert number of prints) I can through (insert number of freebies) in for free!

 

[selo]

Thats a good idea but on the other hand, if someone decides not to buy the picture but still use it.. it is a free advertisement for you and someone who steals won't buy the picture anyway. They will just ignore your request to buy a watermark free version. Like you said you won't make friends by threaten them with legal steps. Also it is probably not worth the time.

 

[tirediron]

It's simple really. Stop selling on line. When the images are reading for the client to review them, pack up your laptop and toddle off to their home. Sit down with them, and show them each image. Offer recommendations based on the look, size and style of their home as to what sort of product in what size would be suitable where. Preveal is a fantastic in-person sales asset. When clients see what an 11x14 or 16x20, or 20x30 looks like instead of that 8x10 (it's amazing how many people think that 8x10 is a LARGE print), your sales will go wayyyyyyyyy up, and there's NO issue with images being stolen!

 

[vintagesnaps]

Where are you putting the pictures?? On sites like Facebook and Instagram you need to read the Terms & Conditions because putting your photos on those kind of sites puts usage of your photos under their Terms. Working photographers I know in my area put select sample photos on their social media pages and link to their own sites.

I think your fees and quality of photos needs to be competitive with others in your area. I'm not sure why you feel you need a bigger portfolio. I'd suggest you work on your business plan and look at some professional resources from pro organizations like ASMP or PPA.

 

[selo]

Hi offline selling is definitely much better since you can convince them to sell more. This is something we would like to do in the near future. We just started our company and have lots of things we still want to do yet. One of them is set online selling system, Which is already working and proofed to be profitable. Already got more sales. This is usefull if the customers lives far away form you so you dont have travel, costs you gas and money. You can travel to big customers i suppose.

We put the pictures that our for sale on a password protected area on our own page. After customer buy them, and they gives us permission to post on social media, we do just that. But only the pictures they bought. We never post pictures without permission. Our price and quality compared to hobbyist are very good. Both are higher, but not a lot.
Compared to other pro's our quality needs a little work (although some pro's are much worse in terms of quality than us with higher price) our prices are lower than the other pro's so there is room to increase price ones our quality improves. Time will tell i suppose

For example we sell a digital print for 13 usd and most good pro's sell them for 20 to 25, both a high resolution and no watermark etc.

 

[KmH]

Indeed - time will tell.

Do you have a legal (registered/licensed) business - business liability insurance, errors and omissions insurance, state sales tax account, business bank account, etc?

Your profile shows no location information. What state/region/country are you in?

I have posted the basic business math many times here on TPF that included how to determine how many shooting days per year you can expect to have, how many sessions per year to expect based on shooting days per year, and how to project revenue and income based on your average sale amount.
I get the impression from your posts in this thread that you have not done the same basic business math and that you don't have a well researched, written business/marketing/promotions plan.

If you do not have a studio, to stay in business and to make a minimal income (say $25,000 a year take home pay), you need yearly gross business revenue of about $150,000 a year, or about $12,500 a month. With a studio you need significantly more revenue because your cost of doing business (CODB) is higher. Your salary is part of your CODB. Your salary is not profit.
Here is an online CODB calculator for press photographers.

The key skill set needed for starting and maintaining a photography business is business skills, not photography skills. Marketing, accounting, salesmanship, promotion, client consultation, and other business tasks should occupy about 75% of your business time. The remaining 25% of your time is for photography and editing.
Having samples clients can see and touch is a key to maximizing the sales potential of each session you shoot.

Substantially increasing your prices generally means most of the client base you spent a lot of time and effort to build will abandon your business based on your new prices. A substantial price increase usually requires doing a lot more marketing, promotion, and advertising to build a new client base. A business axiom is that attracting new clients costs a business about 10 times more than it costs to get current clients to return.

As it is, your prices should go up 3% - 5% every 6 - 8 months just to keep up with all your business costs that also go up.

 

[selo]

We are from the Netherlands, and we have all the legal stuff worked out. Insurcane we have a personal insurance which applies for our business as well.

We also did a basic math, we basically need 2k a month to cover our expenses and like 1k extra for our personel expenses. We do not have a salary because that is how our entity works. We just use our profits. We have a big room about 50 sq meters which we made a studio of. The costs are deductible for tax purposes. When business grows bigger, we want a different studio elsewhere obv after we make another business plan.

The key for succes is indeed not just photography. We made plans on how to communicate with customers, this helps to get more bookings. Accounting is taken care off by an accountant, we have a database with all customers with their birthdays etc. As a promotion we will give them discount for photoshoots. We have a few more ideas like that. For marketing we need to work on that, since we did not expect to be this busy, we have not been able to work out our marketing plan. One thing we want to asap is getting better rating with SEO. Also offline promoiton is on our list.

Our first price was based on competing with hobbyist, now we decided compute with other studio's. The from price is cheaper actually but customers get less for there money, so post sales should increase (which does) and it doesn't seem like we get less bookings with our current plan.

Like you said you will lose your current customers with a significant change, we were aware of this and we are happy that we did lose these customers. Ussually there are people that do not give you the recognition that you deserve... if you reach your hand they'll take your hand (is a saying we use a lot ) We want customers that wants to spend a little extra for the quality you give and not customers that just wants picture because it has to be done... At first we were a little scared this change might fail, but the first signs are good hope it stays like this.

In the Netherlands to cover business expenses (you mean infaltion?) 3-5% is pretty high 3% a year is more than enough. We want our pricing plan as it is now and end of this year we will analyze our data and see what we can improve or change etc

But this our first year and i make sure everything is written down so we can do good analyze...


We also recently closed a deal with a daycare to take picture. This will hopefully open more doors for B2B photography. This is maybe somethin i could so and my wife could focus on B2C.


Its going to fast... so all tips are welcome