Photo sharing is more than being able to send an image to a third party, it is about protecting your business and building trust with potential clients. With a secure system, you can prevent clients from getting the image without paying and help leads feel confident their images are secure if they hire you.
Whether you photograph weddings, capture corporate images for trade show booths, or do product shots for e-commerce clients, there will come a time when someone will try and take the image without paying. Don’t let this happen to you! You have options to protect your work.
These include:
Protecting Your Work: Essential Security Measures
The first and easiest solution for protecting deliverables is watermarking. When choosing a photo sharing service, ask customer support if you can have watermarks automatically added whenever a third party accesses the images within your galleries. It isn’t enough to place your logo on the image, as logos can be cropped out. If you don’t like watermarking, don’t worry; there are other ways to protect your images. The next level is right-click prevention.
Users will try to right-click on an image and download it for free, especially if they can upscale the shot to reduce pixelation. By making sure your client galleries have right-clicking disabled, you can help prevent unwanted downloads when you share a link to access the images. And this goes code deep.
Advanced Privacy Features for Client Confidence
More tech-savvy clients will look at a page’s source code or try an image extractor. Open the page source of the webpage and look for the image name. It is as easy as doing a text search and typing in the file name. Now, open the URL with the image and see if the image shows up with a watermark. Once you find the image file, try downloading it and upscaling it to make sure the client cannot do this and bypass paying you. If this sounds intimidating, don’t sweat it. There are lots of ways to keep your work from getting “exposed” to unwanted downloads.
- Watermarking
- Low-res samples
- Password protected galleries
- Encrypted links
- Right-click prevention
- Small file-size images in the code base
Talk to your photo sharing service and ask if they offer password-protected galleries or a way to send an encrypted link that only lets clients access the images you put into the private gallery. Having password-protected galleries isn’t only important for fine art and custom business shoots, it is important for portraiture too.
Boudoir is one of the largest markets in which to make money. If you have a secure photo sharing system, you can list the ways you protect your clients by keeping their most intimate images guarded. Sharing how you take extra precautions helps set yourself apart from your competition, which forgets this on their “why hire us” pages. And don’t forget your parents!
Seamless Access and Usability for Photographers
Making sure family photos or even holiday sessions don’t get out into the real world is vital. Parents want to keep images of their children safe from downloading. They want to prevent their kids from getting bullied and the images from being turned into memes. By letting them know you keep session access under their control, you’ll help gain their trust. And there’s one thing outside of security that is important with photo sharing: ease of use.
Once you know your photo sharing service has the levels of privacy needed for your business, make sure you’re able to retrieve and display your work.
The first step is to have an app available that can be used on connected devices. Being able to open an app while at a client site to display the shots is an important safeguard in case your camera or computer gets damaged or breaks. Next is having a portal that can let you access your work with ease.
2FA and password protection are important, but what happens if the system locks you out and recovery is tricky? Talk to the support team and see what controls there are to access your work when you’re overseas and in different locations. This is especially important for travel, landscape, and workshop photographers. Not to mention if you’re editing at a client site. Being able to get the work from unknown locations makes the difference between a productive visit and a flop.
Enhancing Trust and Growing Your Photography Business
Last is the speed to access your galleries. If the photo sharing solution is too complex or the load times are too long, you’ll have cranky clients. Test each system before you purchase and use different connection types, including cell phone data plans. You never know when you won’t have wifi and will need to rely on your phone’s network to save the day.
Photo sharing is more than just finding an easy way to get photos to your client, it is protecting your business. Make sure you have the highest levels of privacy and security available and that your clients know you take extra steps to keep their images safe. This goes a long way in helping you prevent images from being stolen and printed, as well as turning leads into paying clients.
If you’re ready to protect your photos and make money, click here to try SmugMug free for 14 days and save 15% if you decide to purchase a new account. SmugMug is a leader in photo sharing, storage, and selling prints.
