Copyright

Every photograph, design and page on this site is the work of Barton James Christner. The terms below are embedded inside every image file published here, and travel with the picture wherever it goes.

Image protection

These settings control how every photograph on this site is presented to a browser. Change a value here and it applies across the whole site immediately, and to every image the pipeline produces from now on.

What this can and cannot do. Nothing can stop a determined person copying a picture from a website: to show you an image, a browser must first send it to you, and a screenshot always works. What these settings do is stop the casual copy - the drag to the desktop, the right-click save - which is the great majority of it. Real protection is the watermark, the resolution published, the copyright embedded in every file, and the law.

off disables the behaviour for visitors, which is the protective setting. DRAG: off stops dragging an image out of the page. OVERLAY: on places an invisible layer over each photograph so a right-click lands on it rather than the picture. RIGHTCLICK: on leaves the normal menu working - set it to off to suppress the menu entirely, but be aware that also removes "open in new tab" for the art directors and clients you want browsing comfortably. LONGPRESS: off stops the press-and-hold save on phones and tablets.

Watermark

Every photograph published to the live website carries Bart's signature, tiled across the frame. No two pictures carry the same arrangement.

Why it varies. Google Research showed in 2017 that a watermark applied identically across a collection can be removed automatically - with enough images sharing one overlay, the watermark is the only constant, so it can be solved for and subtracted. The answer, and Shutterstock's, is to stop repeating: every image gets its own size, lean, phase and jitter, derived from its own file name. Deterministic, so a rebuild never reshuffles it, and no two pictures share a mark to average out.

Where it is applied. On the way to the server, never to the copies on Bart's Mac. The pictures in this project keep their embedded copyright and stay unmarked; the published copies are the ones that carry the signature. That way the marked version is always regenerated from a clean original and the mark is never applied twice to the same file.

SIZE is how wide one signature is, as a percentage of the frame - measured against the whole frame, not its width, so a portrait and a landscape get the same apparent size. DENSITY is roughly how many signatures land on a picture; the spacing is worked out from it, so an odd shape gets the same count as a normal one. CONTRAST is how far the mark steps away from whatever it is sitting on, in brightness levels out of 255 - lighter over a shadow, darker over a sky, so it stays equally visible on a night shot and on white paper. ANGLE is the lean in degrees. JITTER nudges each mark off the grid. MINEDGE is the smallest picture worth marking, in pixels on the long edge - a signature tiled across a thumbnail is illegible and protects nothing, so anything smaller is published exactly as it is.

QUALITY is the JPEG quality the marked copies are written at, and it governs the band as well. Adding a watermark is the only step in this entire pipeline that re-compresses a photograph, so this number is the only place image quality is ever spent. Measured on the church interior: at 88 the re-encode shifted the untouched parts of the picture by an average of 0.99 brightness levels out of 255; at 95 that falls to 0.30, which is below what an eye can detect. 97 and 100 buy almost nothing further and cost a great deal of storage. Bart, 2026-08-26: "at this time quality is authority".

The settings above are the ones taken from D1_Interior_LINE/20050801_G4P4_WeddingMountzWainwright_PHOTO_BJJP8K3M_POINT.jpg, the church interior Bart judged right on 2026-08-26. Raising CONTRAST makes each mark louder; raising DENSITY puts more of them on the picture without making any one louder, which is the better defence against someone cropping a corner out.

Image band

The strip beneath a published photograph carrying Bart's name, the tagline, the image's own file name, and the site address.

The name and tagline are not written here - they are read from the page banner, so the band and the heading at the top of this page can never disagree. HEIGHT is the band's share of the image width, as a percentage; 5.68 matches Bart's original artwork. APPLYTO: point puts the band on photograph cards only. all adds it to the chapter collages too - but those are laid out 300 pixels wide beside their text, where a band renders about 17 pixels tall and cannot be read, so point is the setting that makes sense. ON: no turns it off everywhere.

The band is added below the picture rather than over it, so it covers none of the photograph and moves none of the clickable regions on a chapter collage.