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In need of security advice ...

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barney:
That's when copyright comes into play, weak as it is.

The point here is to make this more difficult than most folk would consider worthwhile overcoming.

And, although copyright is not all it could be and is frequently misused, most folk will shy away from perceived violation.  The implied threat of legal action will deter many.  The security stuff is to make it more difficult for others.

While absolute security is a non-sequitur, reasonable security can be approached, and that is the windmill at which I tilt, for the nonce. 

Eóin:
I'm not so sure that the issue of effort vs. return comes into play with hacky "content protectors" as bypassing them is usually effortless. Also I find such tricks to be pretty obnoxious. If I can view the content then that's simply it, I have a copy of it on my machine, a copy I was willfully given. Anything someone does to try and make it difficult for me to get at what is already on my machine is simply wrong, evil, and highly malicious behavior.

If you don't want someone to have a copy of an image, then don't give that someone a copy of the image.

Stoic Joker:
If I can view the content then that's simply it, I have a copy of it on my machine, a copy I was willfully given.-Eóin (January 01, 2011, 06:19 PM)
--- End quote ---

...and that is the best short description of the end-game so far. Anything viewed is already had, end of story.

Locks only keep out honest people, and copyrights don't scare anybody - Dire FBI warning at the beginning of every movie ... ever meet anyone that didn't laugh at it? I haven't.

Renegade:
The sanest, most effective thing I can think of is to have:

1) Thumbs with a small lower-corner watermark.
2) Full-size photos/images with watermarks either large or patterned. Lines through works as well.
3) Have a back-end application/script that can serve up full photos/images without giving out their URL and have all the full images with no read permissions.

1 & 2 are trivial.

3 is more complex, but safe. You only serve up the full images to authorized users or paying customers. There are plenty of scripts out there that do that. They typically have URLs like this:

http://somesite.com/image.php (gets info through a POST)
http://somesite.com/image.php?userid=you&imageid=someimage (checks you to see if you are authorized & serves up your image)

Often the "someimage" ID is simply randomly determined and not actually an ID for a particular image. i.e. It's a transaction ID. That's safer.

I think the above recommendations to check out professional photographer's sites is a good idea. Or just search for "stock photography" and have a look at how they do it.

Bamse:
Yes but from a pragmatic point of view is SmugMug not the optimal solution? I have no "Pro" account and only know them as being "highly recommended" as a the choice for serious pixel sharing - when Flickr, Picasa are not sufficient. They target people just like her so why are they not good enough? Answer that or go SmugMug (or their competitors which I don't know) Another very important parameter is presentation. If SmugMug has the perfect theme, the perfect mini-blog/info section that might overrule any possible "better" security setup she "might" be able to set up on her own (or with help from dad). Doing something on your own is not necessarily any better. Wordpress can do many things or rather plugins can but how does she imagine her photos being presented. SmugMug or similar will make it easy and slick - way more than a default WP setup. What promote her ambitions of going pro the best? If possible if and if concerns about throwing content at an (highly recommende) online service is a worry how much better is alternative? If it is a knitting project of cool scripts and self hosted you need to maintain each part on a daily basis (if paranoid enough!) - if not maintained kiss security goodbye ;)

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