You can save them to your hard drive. You can upload them somewhere else and use them on the web yourself. You can use them for school projects, etc. It would be nice if you gave me credit for the photograph, but it is not necessary.
Even the larger versions are web quality, so they aren't going to print very well. If you have a good reason for printing my photo, email me. I would probably be willing to give you a higher quality photo.
But please DO NOT DIRECT LINK to my photographs. I have the photographs hosted on the same server as my website. I have to pay for the bandwidth every time a photograph is downloaded.
The reason this has come up is the use of the New Year's photo of my cat that used to be on this blog. Last week it was downloaded more than 8000 times. If you took this photo, it no longer works. It now looks like this.
I found a blog that was using one of my photos for the background image. Fortunately, an email to the blogger got that one removed. But the cat photo is posted all over the place on blogs, forums, etc. I will probably be paying bandwidth for that one forever. Even if I removed the message, there would still be hits looking for the image which also takes some bandwidth. Hopefully, it is not in places where it will get viewed often.
You may be wondering how I know who took my photos. When you have a website, you can get a log to show the activity on the site. This is something most web hosts provide. I have mine set to provide a new log record once a week. I can then look at the log to find out how many people visited my website that week, how many pages within the site were visited, how many visited each page, how many times a file was downloaded, etc. It also gives me the URLs of referring sites, meaning those where someone clicked a link to my site or the site requested a file on my server. All this is useful to me as a web site owner because it tells me which items on the website are most useful to my visitors.
Just on a side note, my log report gives me the IP addresses of all my visitors. I personally don't do anything with these. But you should be aware that when you visit a site, you do leave traces behind.
When you "borrow" a photo or other image from a blog or website, take note of where the file is coming from. If a person has a photo on one of the free sites or if they upload to Blogger, then direct linking doesn't cost them anything. But if the photo is hosted on a regular website like mine are, it is costing the website owner money every time that image shows up, even on other websites or blogs. So make a habit of looking at the source of the photo you are planning to link to.
Of course, I know that some of you are saying, "So what?" Well, in the early days of the web, there used to be a lot of people who liked to make web quality graphics that they gave away for free. These were very useful to people who wanted to make a website, but didn't have the software to make the graphics or the money to buy some. Some of these things were beautiful, real works of art. But instead of saving them and then uploading them to their website host as they were asked to do, many people would just direct link to the graphics. So these people who made these FREE graphics suddenly started getting huge bills from their web hosts for exceeding their allowed bandwidth usage. Guess what? These sites were shut down because the graphic artists could no longer afford to keep them up.
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