Essentials Cafe

Does anyone know other people can download our art work and use it without our consent? Or do we as creators maintain full rights?

 you as the creator automatically have full copyright - but think of this, for print an image needs to be at least 300ppi, neither should it be compressed - therefore a picture from our forum of say 800 x 600 pixels compressed to below 256kb is only 2.6" x 1.7" @ 300ppi - not exactly much use to man nor beast - this is less than 20% in size of an image straight from my camera, and the 15mb image has shrunk down to 256kb or less - not much use other than to look at and get a general idea of what the picture originally loooked like - I cannot imagine commercial use of such a tiny image, with the risks of copyright infringement involved

As a photographer I deal with this all the time, tracking down those who are linking to my images.  Tolouse is right regarding copyright.  You have to watch out which websites you upload your images to, as some grab rights from you.

Needless to say copyright won't stop people from copying your image, saving it onto your computer, etc.  If it's posted online, even if there are "protections" that prevent right-click saving, as long as it's displayed on a screen people can take it!

And DPI is meaningless for protecting images...if you post an 8mp image at 10dpi thinking it will stop people from producing a quality print think again...anyone can change the DPI at any time.  It's best to keep an image small in terms of pixels...1024x768 is the largest image size I would post online, but usually smaller.