Artist Guides

Image Size & File Control (Why This Matters) A Groupform Guide for Artists
If an image looks printable when zoomed, it’s too large to share publicly. How Large Should Images Be Online? Images shared online should be large enough to be seen clearly, but small enough to protect the work. As a general rule, 1200–1600 pixels on the long edge is ideal for online sharing. This range displays well on phones and laptops while avoiding files that are useful for print, scraping, or automated reuse. While 1200-1600px is a good default, some artists might go smaller (800-1000px) for highly detailed work where even... Read more...
Best practices for sharing images and work online in 2026
Our goal at groupForm = How to be visible without being extractable Making work public does not have to mean giving it away. This guide outlines simple, practical ways artists can share their work online while protecting authorship, context, and value  in an era of large-scale scraping and automated reuse. These practices are not about hiding. They are about control. 1. Don’t publish straight from your phone Images taken on your phone are high-resolution, metadata-rich originals. Treat them as source files, not publish files. Before sharing: Never upload the original... Read more...
10 new rules for artists in the age of AI
10 Rules all artists should follow to protect their art, practice, and artistic-identities.  Read more...
Artists should treat public distribution like a conversation, not a broadcast.
The best protection for artists in the AI world is intentional circulation You don’t have to hide your work.You just have to design how it’s seen, accessed, and encountered so that: it’s easy for humans to appreciate it’s harder for automated systems to trivially ingest access is tied to real human intent, not anonymous bot traffic In practical terms: Artists should treat public distribution like a conversation, not a broadcast. AI training and scraping workflows are extremely efficient and increasingly business as usual for large models and analytics firms. But... Read more...
Visibility and "reach" alone does not lead to success
Most artists want their work to be seen, but without meaningfully empowering the extraction of the work by machines. AI systems, scraping bots, and bad actors thrive on things like: scale — vast numbers of pages or images available without restriction clarity — clean, front-on, high-resolution, easy-to-parse pictures repetition — large volumes of similar images over time Artists, by contrast, thrive on: context ambiguity relationships with real people because our work lives in the real world Your job isn’t to disappear from view — it’s to design the way your work... Read more...
An artist's guide in the age of AI
There’s an important paradox at the heart of what’s happening online today: - You do not protect art by hiding it.- You protect art by circulating it with care. We will not beat AI at its own game. The goal is therefore to make your work unappealing to extract and difficult for machines to understand. We aim to explain how to circulate your work without feeding extraction systems. Because simply being on the web doesn’t mean someone should grab your images, feed them into a dataset, or repurpose them without... Read more...