How to lock photos on facebook so no one can save them

Whenever sharing is involved, there is a always a chance that someone will break the ties that bind and violate your trust. If you’re worried about your photos getting stolen from your Facebook or Twitter accounts, worry no more. Here is one sure-fire technique that will stop any and all digital photography theft.

Ask yourself this. Do you really need to protect your photos from theft?

It all depends on a lot of factors. First of all, Facebook and Twitter already have some pretty strict download guidelines. Nobody can legally go into your photos and download them to their hard drive. The site’s policy doesn’t allow it. Plus, to make things worse for any potential digital art thief, Facebook and Twitter both dramatically reduce the quality of the images you upload. Your untrustworthy friend will never be able to download anything useful in a truly meaningful sense.

And that's good enough for most of us. It's completely fine if you are sharing your photos with your friends.

But what about if you want to sell your photos? You want your clients to see the photos, but not use them without paying for them.

As Facebook and Twitter only show reduced sized versions of your images, any would-be criminal won't be able to use those versions. The quality will be so diminished that it will be impossible to sell the image. Printing is certainly out of the question. Maybe your criminal can print a photo big enough to put up on her refrigerator, but there’s no way she’ll be able to print something big enough to show at a gallery. Her hands are tied. In order to do anything meaningful with your image, a criminal needs to have the full quality file.

How to prevent anyone from using your images

The first way is to upload a smaller copy of the file than your original. That way no one will have access to the full image but you. Facebook and Twitter mostly do this automatically (to save their server space). People might be able to steal your photos, but they aren’t going to get the whole thing. They’ll get a little souvenir keychain version, and that’s hardly worth the effort.

Even so, perhaps you just want to be 100% certain that nobody will take your images. Maybe you’ve got a trade secret you want to keep secret. Thankfully, there is a very easy way to protect your images from all manner of online thievery. All you need is some basic photo editing software like Photoshop Elements.

Just open up your image, and go to the text tool. Then, click on the bottom righthand corner of your image and write your name. That’s all you need to do to prevent most criminals from using your image. It often helps to change the color of the text to white or something that doesn’t blend in with the image. You can get fancy too, writing “Copyright June 2011,” if you prefer, but that doesn’t really have an effect on the legal side of things. Your images, according to international law, are copyrighted the second you snap them with your camera. Pretty cool, eh?

Need more security?

Just select the line tool, pick a line color, and then draw a light “X” over your image. Make sure you use a small brush width, so it doesn’t ruin the look of your image.

The white line is annoying enough to prevent theft but not so annoying that it ruins the visual appeal of the image. It's still possible for a determined criminal to use correction software to remove the lines, but it's usually not worth it and the results aren't spectacular either. They definitely wouldn't be able to sell the resulting image.

The Only Bulletproof Method

The only really sure-fire way to protect your photography from anyone, is never to upload it to the Internet. But then you don't get to share your masterpieces, or show your work to new clients.

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