I am an artistic photographer and post stuff of my own online on my blog and website, etc. What are the best guidelines to follow to curb people from stealing my images. Lo-res images? A watermark?

The blog is hosted by a different company. They say in their terms of agreement that they do not own the images, but they do get a non-exclusive right to publish them royalty-free to promote their own company, or their related companies. That always makes me uneasy, but it is par for the course these days until I can host my own blog.

What is your advice about it?

thanks

If you use Nikon DSLR's you can put your copyright in the image comment portion of the menu. Then every image you take has your copyright embedded in the file.

If you are using Photoshop, you can use the xmp file to list not only your copyright, but your name, address, email address, phone number as well as the location and key words. All of this information is attached to the file. When you re-size the file and save it as Internet ready, you can set the attributes as read only. If nothing else, anyone who makes changes in your image files, will do so knowing that they are infringing upon your copyright.

Since you are reducing the resolution of the images you are "sharing" on the Internet, you can make it nearly impossible for anyone to be able to use your images commercially.

I use 400 pixels for the longest side of the image at 72 pixels/inch and then save as a JPEG at a compression setting that makes the file less than 40 kb (about a 5 on the JPEG compression scale in Photoshop)