sizing photos for websites

Our local photo club is establishing a website which will permit members to have portfolios of images for display only; no sales will be permitted. Many members do not have their images watermarked and concerns about anyone downloading images for other purposes has been raised. Is there a certain sizing and resolution which will permit reasonable viewing of images yet discourage others from the opportunity to use these images for other purposes? Although watermarking is the obvious answer to the problem that solution seems to detract from the simple viewing process in the opinion of many.

This has been discussed several times before. See for example:
http://www.naturescapes.net/forums/view ... 2&t=214534

The short answer is that screens are getting higher and higher resolution, including even the screens on your smartphone. Any image that looks good on-screen can be printed at least okay, up to sizes like 8x10. And any image put online can be obtained by the viewer; it can't be stopped.

If you put images online, they are at risk of being taken and used for unauthorized purposes. The basic choices are more or less the same as they always have been. The main difference is that technology is moving forward and the quality target to look good on modern displays is going up. In general, your options are:

• don't put images online
• put images online at very low resolution, or with so much compression, that they look increasingly poor on screens that are getting bigger & higher resolution
• put images online looking decent but with embedded metadata & visible watermarks, and make efforts to educate and/or go after people regarding unauthorized use
• put images online looking decent, skip the visible watermarks and enforcement, and just live with the fact that unauthorized use will happen

The choice is up to each photographer how to incorporate online presentation, balancing publicity for the work vs. concerns over unauthorized use.

"Is there a certain sizing and resolution"

Only the pixel dimensions of the image matter. PPI (72, 96, 300, etc.) doesn't make any difference when viewing or copying from the web.

Having run camera club websites and had responsible for all things 'digital' I can fully support Royce's answer. I gave a small take to members on the risks and options of presenting on the net and designed an illustrated tutorial on how to resize images for the web using Photoshop or Elements. That helped many members.

In the end those that were competent and comfortable with web presentation used the portfolio feature of the site. We did have our legal service device a new form for members to sign indicating the club would display winning entries from club competitions on the website but bore no responsibility for misuse and that included members portfolios. We had established members sign the new form too.

The thing is photo theft have become so much common that its become mandatory to watermark your photos.It is also recommended to resize your photos to a smaller resolution like 800X600 Pixels from the high resolution photos you get from the cameras.
Im a professional photographer i always do this.An easy way i can suggest is to use this software called Mass Watermark,it can watermark and resize your photos in bulk making them ready for web upload.When you set the resizing option there are various sizes predefined in it,Its also recommended to add EXIF Data to your pics,the software can do it too.

Take a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKviwY-4tBY