Creating an On-Line photographic Museum

[GNRi1959]

I've often thought of creating an on line 'museum' or 'gallery' of photographs from the steam era in Omagh and also Fintona. It would be nice to let people the material rather than have it archived in photo albums and archived on a hard disk.

Can anyone suggest an on-line platform where I can do this with some sort of security to prevent mass downloading. 

[thewanderer]

Difficult to prevent mass downloading. While the platform I use (smugmug) has a right click disabled option (live on my site) there are still ways and means of downloading files. 

If you have any questions on smugmug that you want to know about drop me a line.

W

 

 

 

[BosKonay]

Simple question perhaps but in what scenario would ‘mass’ downloading be a threat or problem? (Genuine question)

[GNRi1959]

I guess the answer you are looking for is 'don't upload them if you're trying to avoid downloads'!

Seriously, if I thought that years of buying, collecting and expense was just a 'click' away I wouldn't do it.

[popeye]

I have been downloading pictures from the internet for years and i'm sure the rest of you do the same.

It's nice to have a collection of railway pictures of all the things you like and for modelling purposes.

I don't use them for any other purpose. Some sites won't let you download so i don't even bother to

look at them because if you see a picture you like you can't save it.

 

[Glenderg]

I've a 35 gig library that I started assembling back in around 2001 or so, with all the sub folders of buildings, stock and so forth, with the intention of doing drawings and scratchbuilding, and most of them were from the old fotopic site. After it's demise, many users didn't join flickr or smugmug, so are lost to us all. I don't mind screengrabbing if I have to, but they are all for research purposes, not for sharing, and as I've seen some langers do on eBay, sticking up for resale, despite them clearly not owning them. 

There's also the distinction of the photographer - some love the gricer top and tail shots (vast majority) and some take the odd detail or profile shots, or random infrastructure. As long as there's a photo, somewhere, whether downloadable or not, I'm a happy bunny. 

[murrayec]

If one wanted to display a collection and is concerned about protecting their rights to ownership, one could set up a site with,  say Wordpress, that displays photos in a thumbnail format only- low enough resolution to preview,  but no use for printing or zooming in unless permission is granted by the host- this could be done by request, then granting access permission to the user, or emailing the photo to the user.

This requires work and monitoring by the host but does allow the collection to be displayed with a reasonable amount of control and compiles a database of users that permissions have been granted to, if issues arise.....

Eoin

 

[Eiretrains]

The photo site www.flickr.com is a handy free site for archiving and displaying one's photos, which enables users to determine whether they wish to display photos entirely to the public or specifically restrict images to other individual like-minded users on Flickr. Although any form of image display is impossible to fully protect, Flickr to some extent allows for a trustworthy environment to exist for people to display photos. It's used, for instance, for IRRS members to view some of the society's Irish railway archive photos here: www.flickr.com/people/irishrailwayarchive/

[Irishswissernie]

Ernie's Railway Archive is a Flickr site with at present some 12000+ photos and over 21 million hits. I have had in the past some problems with copying but always protect the images (especially those I have uploaded with the permission of copyright holders such as the Armstrong Railway Photographic Trust) with copyright holders overlayers. It is easy to copy images useing a snipping tool; I use one myself, but only for images for my own use.

You can't stop copying but also if you are going to upload images etc then you should also have the copyright or permission to use the images on an internet site.

Ernie