So you know that fancy new photo viewer in Facebook? If you take a look on the bottom of it there is a link there for "Download"... and I bet you can guess what that means.
Yup.. you can download the full resolution version of the picture. Any one who can see your album can do that.
I think I am a little late to the game with this... It looks like it was rolled out sometime last year and I never noticed. There is no way to disable it.. and frankly it has me a bit concerned. I have no idea what the hell Facebook is thinking. It does not serve any purpose other then to further release your photographic work into the "free" domain. There should at least be a option to turn it off.
Everything I post to facebook is down sampled.. but still high res enough to produce 5x7s or so.. certainly not good ones.. but passable by most standards. I am not too worried about people on my friends list screwing me over.. but its a concern just the same.
I am not sure what I am going to do about this new knowledge. My knee jerk reaction is to just remove everything I have up that I really care about. I do have my SmugMug gallery and they seem to have added some facebook connectivity there... What I really want is to drive traffic to that site as opposed to keeping it on facebook.. But if I do that my new work would appear as links.. and likely result in fewer eyeballs viewing them... as opposed to easy to access facebook photos.
I don't know.. gotta think about it and do some google-research.
The bottom line is.. Facebook is not the place to publish your photographic work unless you don't mind your copyright and ownership being violated by anyone.... The average person has no clue on what ownership of a photo really means.. just as they don't understand the idea behind "licensing" usage of music, software, and so on. Because of that your average Facebook user will think nothing of downloading your pics.. printing them.. making them their screen savers... and distributing them to everyone they know.. after all if it was illegal they wouldn't have the download link right?? (wrong)
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