Questions & Answers

How will my artwork be protected from online art thieves?

At Foliotwist, we’re very concerned with protecting your artwork images, but we also want to be careful not to turn away possible buyers with the methods that we use.

Many art website providers offer a watermarking feature, or disable the right-click function of a visitor’s mouse so they can’t right-click and save an image to their computer.

We’ve chosen not to offer these options, because we feel that both of these methods imply that the artist does not trust their own website visitors. Not only that, but adding a watermark to a work of art changes the feeling of that piece away from “art” to something more like “clip-art” or a stock photo. Take a look at any stock-photo site and you’ll see exactly what we mean by this.

Lastly, and very importantly, both watermarking and right-click disabling are ineffective against a thief with even moderate computer and/or Photoshop skills. . . which means that these methods are simply being advertised by website providers to make artists feel safe, rather than actually protect the artwork from thieves.

The number one way that WE protect your images is by changing their resolution and size immediately when you upload them to your website. Our image uploader reduces and compresses all artwork images to a resolution of 72 ppi and a maximum of 600 pixels wide or tall. This is an ideal size to deter image thieves who are looking to print off artwork for free, while still maintaining excellent viewing quality onscreen for all of your legitimate visitors.

In practical terms, this means that if someone steals an image off your site, the biggest image they’ll be able to print is a low-quality 72 ppi image at about 8 inches wide by 8 inches tall.

To give you some reference for those resolution numbers, normal black and white newspapers use a resolution of about 150 ppi. A glossy magazine requires 225 ppi or more, and a fine art print would need 300 ppi before going to print.

With a resolution of 72 dpi, a high school student could use one of your images in a school report, or a potential buyer could email the image to his wife to see what she thinks about it. A fan could even share the image on Facebook, with a link back to your website.

But if anyone tries to print your images at a decent quality (225 ppi or better) they would HAVE to first increase the dpi by reducing the height and width of your images to about 2 and 1/2 inches (smaller images create a higher ppi). Obviously no one would be able to profit off an image that small, which is why this is hands down the best possible deterrent for would-be art thieves.