How to stop prints from CD

[IANMYAR]

Hi People, I took some rugby match pictures at weekend and people have expressed an interest in a CD of images.
What resize figures can I use to allow reasonable viewing on the CD but not for good printing out. ie they come to me to get prints. Also is there anyway to make the CD unrecordable (stop other people making copies)? Thanks in anticipation...

[chris-p]

Hi Ianmyar, welcome to the forum.

Your best bet is to watermark the images. That way it doesn't matter about the resolution (but I'd probably resize to about 800 pixels on the longest edge) or copy protection (which is pretty hard to add anyway). Just stick a semi-transparent watermark over the middle of every shot.
If you've got Photoshop you can do it as an action and automate the whole process. There is even some free watermarking software but I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head.

[IANMYAR]

Thanks Chris, I did think of watermarking, but 100 pics is a lot to do!

[cosmicma]

why not create a dvd slide show from the images ?

this way it would be quite a task to rip individual photos from the VOB files
i'm sure you can also add protection to stop a simple copy of the dvd

beside that you can make a very entertaining show that can be played by more or less anyone in the comfort of there own home

i must say ripping the dvd or screen grabbing photo's from the dvd is not impossible but the resolution of the screen grab would be poor and in my opinion not worth printing
there's no reason why you couldn't watermark each photo before creating a dvd or even overlay a scrolling message saying something like this is the proprty of etc...

i make dvd slideshows for personal use all the time and have now moved on to bluray as the quality difference is a lot

[Photo Troy]

Originally Posted by IANMYAR

Thanks Chris, I did think of watermarking, but 100 pics is a lot to do!

You don't have to do them one by one. In Photoshop elements for example you can click; File, then Process Multiple Files. This gives you the opportunity to watermark, resize and save to another folder in one operation. If you don't have Elements there are some pretty handy programes you can download for free, such as Photoscape, that will do the same thing.

[kiffy]

for resizing jpegs i use a program called jpegresizer, it does a folder full in seconds.. just drag and drop the photos into the window, select size and output folder and press the buton. its a free program normally available from their website http://www.virtualzone.de/ sadly its down at the moment but if you pm me your email address ill send it over (its under 1mb)

for watermarking i use a program called batch watermark creator, once you create your template or use one of the ready made ones its stored in the program. you simply select the folder with original photos and an empty folder and itll watermark the lot in one go and put them in the new folder, leaving your originals untouched. this ones not free it cost me about twenty quid but its worth it if you do a lot of watermarking. i have in the past watermarked several hundred photos in one go and its taken only a min or two. check their website http://www.easy-tools.net/batch-watermark/index.html

as for protection there is no way to stop photo theft, watermarkings the best way but they can be edited out, its something that i have discovered has been done to me. also no way to copyprotect discs. creating a dvd sliedshows the best way as you can just grab an image from the disc. but if someone wanted to they could play the disc on their pc and do screen shots to steal the photos.

forgot to mention i put my photos online as 800x600 and their perfect to view online or on tvs but print quality isnt so good so i agree with chris on size