Make a disk unable to have data removed from it.

[Chaotic1962]

When we paid our photographer for the wedding shoot, the price included all the taken photos of the wedding, and an album of prints. Your grandfather is prolly doin it wrong business wise.

[Dawn Falcon]

It's pretty trivial. Give them low DPI files optimised for screen reading.

Of course, I hope his contract with them states that's what he's doing. Or otherwise, well...

[Biged781]

Wait, are these photographs that someone has paid for? Why is this a problem? You have to give them what thy paid for. The contract should include some form of licensing rights, but honestly, if someone wants to copy them all over the internet you can't stop it. The good news is that most people will not, and even if they do it really doesn't hurt business. Sounds like too much worrying over nothing.

[Organoth]

Some people need to brush up on their copy right law. Any photographer can copy right any photo they take, regardless of who pays them for it. Think back to the days of your school pictures, those are all copy righted too and it is against the law to make copies of them yourself. The paper work that your parents sign for the school to take your photo says as much. Yes people make copies of them but it's still 100% against the law.

To the OP, the best thing your Grandfather can do is allow his customers to view the photos with him and have them pick out what they want printed. If he gives them a disc and he can have the pictures imbedded with a water mark that prevents them from being printed as a clean picture. It's a very common practice, the pictures on the disc can have something like "This photo is property of "insert name here" as a transparent water mark over the photo.

You can still see what the picture is but there is no way to view it or print it with out that water mark being visible. So if the people want copies they have order them from your grandfather who has the originals that don't have watermarks.

The other option is your grandfather can sell the people the "rights" to the photos for an additional fee meaning he gives them everything when he is done and they own the photos instead of him.

You can see some example of watermarked photos here. Those water marks will also prevent his clients from using some place like Kinkos or Kodak to make any copies. When they see those water marks those companies are required by law to refuse to make any copies.

[asharia]

You're only option is to put watermarks over all the pictures.

You cant stop them being copied if you give out a disk.

[Fireslave]

He could always water mark the photos on the disk. His copy is a clean copy but the disc photos have a watermark. he could always just offer the disk when they spent £££ or more, or offer it with certain packages of photos.

[Riaya]

Soooo, my grandad is a amature photographer and is going to be doing wedding photos next weekend, he is wanting to give his customer a disk with all the photographs on, but he doesn't want his customer to be able to take the photographs from the disk to get them printed, he wants them to come back to him so that he will supply the photographs. Therefore making him some more cash!

I don't know what i'd search on google otherwise i'd have went there, hopefully someone here will be able to help me! I know you can 'Finalise' a disk, but as far as i'm aware that only means you can not add anymore data to the disk, not sure if that makes it so you can't remove data.

Hope someone can help, Cheers!

Why doesn't your grandad burn the pictures into the DVD or BluRay format. Most people do not have a clue, software, or computer capable of ripping them.

[FlawlessSoul]

As the smart people already said, you cannot prevent them copying data if you give it to them to view. Viewing the data requires access to it, which allows copying. Even if you wrote your own program to access encrypted data files, they could use screen capture to copy the pictures.

Your only options are watermarks (which don't matter to the purchaser, even if they're across the middle of the photo, since they'll be buying a copy of the original picture without it), physical album (watermarked or not, lower resolution perhaps), or a kiosk-style setup (either at your location, or installed to a laptop and sent to them. It'd still be possible to copy them, however, and would require supervision).

Many photographers use online albums where the photos are still watermarked and lower resolution.

Why doesn't your grandad burn the pictures into the DVD or BluRay format. Most people do not have a clue, software, or computer capable of ripping them.

And apparently some of those people post in this thread.

[IronJohn]

What you are trying to do is find a technical way to solve a legal problem and that just isn't possible. Please check the National Press Photographers Association web site at: nppa.org

select the Professionals tab;
then select Self-Training Resources;
then select Special Reports cover safety, ethics and copyright issues;
then find the topic "Our Images are Our Legacy" and select Read the Report Online

This is a good resource for understanding the legal rights for photographers, please pay careful attention to the differences between freelance and for-hire
photographers.

In a nutshell if your grandfather decides that he wants to be a freelance photographer then the photos belong to him. He will need to put a watermark with his copyright on all of his photos, usually diagionally across the picture. This gives the customer an opportunity to look at the photos and makes it difficult for them to use any photo editing tools to remove the watermark and still have a nice looking picture. The copyright is also a warning to any reputable commercial business that they will need a legal release form before they can make any copies, most reputable businesses do not want to get caught in a copyright dispute.

If he decides that he wants to be a for-hire photographer then the customer is paying him a commission for the use of his time, talent and equipment and the photos belong entirely to the customer.

The best thing for your grandfather to do is decide how he wants to handle the situation and get a contract signed before he shoots his first picture. My advice would be to get a contract in any case, even if (and probably especially if) the customer is a friend, this helps to avoid any misunderstandings later on.

If your grandfather still has questions he he might want to find himself a good copyright lawyer that specializes in photography. He can get a good deal of valuable information in a one hour session that won't cost him too much money.

[vesseblah]

Would recommend supplying USB stick with:

a) watermarked maximum resolution pictures and
b) low resolution (~1024*768) clean pictures.

That way customers can see exactly what they're getting but both file sets A and B will be unusable for high quality prints. Or simply the low res versions as DVD slideshow as mentioned before. Even if the pictures can be easily ripped off the DVD, resolution is so low that nobody will ever want to use those for printing.

[Against the Modern World]

the beauty of the print screen key.

Resulting DPI is too low.