Years ago when the web was young on photography sites, a frequent thread subject was dangers of putting image content on the web and various hot linking issues. Those were days when almost any image jpg's were usually rather puny less than 300 pixel width. Since serious printing is at least 200 pixels and more often 300 pixels per inch, that means a puny one inch picture. In other words something fit for a itty bitty business card or coffee mug. At some point I began posting on my own web site smallest images of mostly 720 pixel width with larger images up to about 1000 pixels. Still that is only going to make for a wee 3 to 5 inch usable image. Amusingly that seemed to rattle the status quo. I basically said there was little commercially someone would ever be able to do with such small images. They also argued many users could only display tiny images especially at the dial up baud rates of the day and I said not for long as modems speeds, computers memory, browser power, and microprocessor speed was certain to go way beyond that issue in short order which it has. '
Others whined someone could copy then use the embedded image on another web site without credit. That is true and potentially annoying but without any financial importance to the original owner. If one is motivated, they can inform the hosting provider of a purpetrator but if that purpetrator is a small fish there is nothing that would interest lawyers to pursue legal action. If the purpetrator has lots of assets like successful corps and is in a Western country especially the USA, lawyers will be happy to assist one for even small copywrite image infringements. Thus one ought to expect small web vermin will sometimes illegally use our small web images and not worry about anyone poking them with a stick.
Bob Sihler >>>"The amount of damage that has been done to this site through drama about photos and photo voting is both vast and incalculable."
Well that may be an overly dramatic way of saying it is an unpleasant festering element of the site but I would tend to say it is a minor element haha. I almost never vote on images because the voting system is as I complained about years ago more than once is an unfunctional joke with strongly rated images too often bearing little relation to image quality. But then as some quite correctly have noted, the site is about Climbing NOT photography, thus so what! Regardless I still post a few images downsized to less than 1000 pixel widths here each year in the interest of supporting threads and content. I have noticed a fair number of new digital camera users that (too lazy to edit and downsize?) seem to like dumping in their full sized images of several thousand wide pixel widths. Fine as long as they don't care. As long as there are such larger images posted by non-pros, any professionals have little to worry about if they only post small sizes.
David Senesac
http://www.davidsenesac.com