White Trees Journal Quilt

Here is a Journal Quilt I made for a challenge at Quilting Arts. Sniff, they didn't publish it. I like it though. It is from a photograph I took at Yosemite.

More on Posting Images

Well, 3 different people contacted me about holes in my scheme for posting images on the web.

Here are the problems ...

If you grabbed the image in the last post by right-clicking on it and downloading it, you lost the file information.

It is trivial to crop out or blank out the visual copyright notice and someone -- like a school child -- could even do it with no evil intent.

It is also easy to rename the file -- ditto on the no evil intent thing.

It is easy to resize it to make it larger. You would not have as good a quality of an image as I started with, but you might not care.

No one so far actually managed to remove the digimarc information -- even with resizing, so that was good.

The little snippet of the file above -- which has been cropped, had its color changed and been scribbled on actually still has the digital watermark. So, if you are trying to actually use the image as is, the digital watermark is a little hard to get rid of. So that is good.

I thought that today, I would try to disable the right-click. So I looked that up. What I need to do is add a little bit of code to the HTML.

The bit of code is this:

oncontextmenu="return false;"

The way that I added it is to go into the HTML code and add the line just above right after

"img" tag. That is up in the top of the file with a bunch of hard to understand stuff. But it is right by the name of the file I uploaded so I can search on that to get close.

Like, all the other things I am doing, this won't stop someone who is determined. But it would help slow down people and make them think a little. Oh, and another bonus for this one, Blogger didn't have to resize the image I posted, so I still have my copyright notice in my file information on this one.

Posting an Image

Well, here is my first image post.

This is a digital painting that hasn't been displayed anywhere before. When I put images up on my website, I didn't worry about anyone taking them. So I didn't worry about copyright notices. I am still not extremely worried about it but with all the fuss over copyright recently, I have it on my mind. Also, I did hear of a woman who set up a Cafe Press shop using the cool images she had found on the web.

So, anyway, I figured I would add copyright notices to anything I uploaded from now on...

Here is what I have done in case you are interested.

I am protecting my image five ways, which is probably overkill but it won't hurt anything. (I hope.)

The first way is that I am only uploading a small image.

The second is that I added a copyright notice along the bottom of the image.

The third is that the filename includes my name. (This is one I am worrying about.)

The fourth way is that I added copyright information to the file information in the file. A lot of image formats have a place to put extra information. An example of that is the EXIF information that cameras write to their photo files. The EXIF information includes data about when the photo was taken and camera settings at the time.

There are also slots for copyright information there. So I used it. In Photoshop CS3 that is under File/File Info...

After I added the information I saved the file several ways to try it out. It was saved in .jpg and .tif formats but not in .gif. Also, all the information was there when I did a File/Save As but only the copyright information was saved when I did a File/Save for Web.

The last way I included the copyright information is that I used a digital watermarking plug-in (from http://www.digimarc.com/) to add a digital watermark. You register with them and then you can use their plug-in to magically hide your secret code in the actual image. You do have to pay for that, and I'm not sure it is worth the money yet. As of last night it cost $79 for the bottom end package. That's what I got. That lets me embed my code in up to 1000 images total and I have to renew once a year.

If I had gotten the top end package at $499 a year then their web spider that would look for my images while it crawled the web. If I ever get famous and want to upgrade my package then it should be able to find the images I am marking now.

That is not working quite as slickly as it ought to. You are supposed to add the watermark last, but on my very first try, I added my visual notice after I had added the watermark and promptly erased the watermark. (And that used up one of my 1000 watermarks.) There are two links to their website to look me up and one is acting flaky for me. The link in the file information (next to the copyright notice that I added) worked before I saved the file, but after I saved a file and re-opened it, that link didn't work anymore. There is another link that their mark reader shows and it did still work -- but to see that you would need to know to look me up.

There is a 14 day money-back guarantee which I might use.

Hi, I'm here now

Hi, here are a few things about me that are relevant to this blog

I am an artist, I like to make things that look interesting (to me) and beautiful (again to me.) Two things permeate most of my work. These are fibers and computers… thus the blog name – Thread and Pixel. It covers nearly all of what I try to do.

So, you say, what are you talking about?

Well, I like to make digital paintings. That is where I start with a blank screen on my computer, and a mouse and some graphics software, probably Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator and make an image. I am pretty proud of some of these and I have managed to have them shown in two different art galleries.

I also like to sew and I have been cheerfully making artist trading cards, or ATC’s, and trading them. These are tiny little cards, just the same size as baseball cards, that are individually made by an artist. I have made them using paper and also using fabric. I haven’t managed to put anything like this in a gallery yet – but I did teach a class on them to about 80 people.

I do a random assortment of other crafts, any of which might end up in here.

I worked as a computer programmer for fifteen years, so I find myself creating computer applications regularly. My parents just had their Golden Anniversary and so my latest big project was to create three Power Point slide shows of their lives so far. I ended up writing three Photoshop scripts to manipulate the photos and a program in Power Point that built the slide shows. It created a slide for each of the image files in a directory and added a caption for each of the slides. It had to read the captions from an Excel spreadsheet.