1.
There is always the risk of photos being used commercially or in other ways not intended once one uploads them online, especially for sites without security features such as copy blocking, download blocking, and/or watermarking (IE: Getty, Shutterstock, Adobe, etc). This was an issue awhile back for micro stock contributors because full images would come up on Google search engines.
2.
That said, images have to be extremely "high end" to be attractive to those that would "download" them and use for sale or other commercial use. The internet is flooded with digital images every day. I suspect 99.9% of them not worth the trouble of copying and selling commercially. Even top micro stock images sell for from 30 cents to 1.00 dollar on average per download for sale. Much much higher on some sites for premier work.
If that was the ulterior motive for some, why not copy from Flickr, Fstoppers, or Micro-stock, sites where the photo level is all pro end?
3.
***** That said. I would think that most photographers that post on a "community oriented" site like "Hedgehog" do so on an honor system and it would be reciprocal to respect that and not copy the images to one's drive.
4.
My experience is as a professional photographer with a portfolio at many micro-stock and personal commercial sites where many are on the "lookout" for even a part of our images that might be reused in a larger work and resold by another, or, even, sites themselves resell to 3rd parties and the images go off to the netherworlds. But, we do what we can. We copyright, send in hard data to the US Copyright office, etc.
5. FWIW, I'm new here, and have been enjoying the site tremendously. To be able to share and shoot images for the sheer joy of it without having to "gear up" and shoot and laboriously process for commercial sale, is a joy.
I hope this has been helpful and my point of view has not offended anyone.
aloha
jim
1. br There is always the risk of photos being use... (