saving fine art photos for web so as to show work but not be good enough to steal

Hi there,

I hope I'm asking in the right place, I've been going around in circles online for a long time and am pretty stuck.  One reason I am stuck is that I am creative and all that but not up to date with all the techical stuff and to be honest my brain just starts to shut down and I don't think it helps that online there's such a varied plethora of answers- and much contradiction!

So essentially my issue is: I have some lovely fine art photography that I'll be exhibiting in real life for the first time and starting to sell ltd ed prints of v. soon.

I obvisoulsy need to put them on the galleries website, my own and socials but I'm worried that they can be copied and stolen. Whilst I understand there's no absolute way to stop this I can see that I can reduce the pixel dimensions and also compress the file to make it less appealing to do so - certainly to make the image rubbish for printing- but of course I don't want it to be too rubbish so that the image isn't "sold" to the viewer.

So... there's A LOT online, so confusing. Also I've gotten into a muddle with technicalities in P.S 'image size' command. When I change pix dimesions, different things happen whether I am also changing ppi from 300 to 72 (have read a lot about this and still confused).

Also whether I'm meant to use this legacy 'save for web' or 'export as' to compress and maybe even resize at same time?

I did use 'save for web' for a photo comp entry, where they needed small file sizes for the entries and drastically reduced file size - I thought that would also affect quality but realised that at full magnification the image is not only same size but no pixelation/ quality reduction- which I suppose is good if all you want to do is reduce file size not image quality but I actually want to make these versions of my work unprintable (at any decent size anyway).

I am starting to understand different aspects to this like how screen resolution comes into play but my head remains muddled to be frank...

I wonder, rather than trying to unpick all of the above if someone would be kind enough to talk me through their opinion/ knowledge of the best way to acheive what I'm aiming for rather than trying to unpick  my muddles. I always find on messages that muddles can get worse... if i could have someone sat next to me to talk it through I'd be so happy!

Perhaps if I had a very clear guide on the best way to acheive the end goal the rest of it just wouldn't matter or I can save it for another day when I'm not trying to acheive a specific thing.

So, ultimately I need to put my fine art photography on websites- just good enough quality to sell the work but not good enough that it's can be copied and printed/ stolen.  

For that I think, (correct me if I'm wrong) I need to reduce pixel dimensions, (600px on longest edge was mentioned elsewhere online,) and compress the file, (not sure what it should be compressed to to actually reduce image quality).

Alos am I best using 'Image size', 'save for web, (legacy)' or 'export as' and what setting (s) am I aiming for to acheive desired results?

I know some of this will be subject to different opinions but if someone can help me distill this to a plan I can follow I'd appreciate it immensely, (as I've googled til my eyes are ready to fall out and my own 'experiments' have not yielded reliable results- I'm sure because I just don't understand enough about it all.)

Ultimately though I just want to get my art work out there as safely as possible rather than trying to become a full expert at this as to be honest it is just not my stregnth.

(I am not at this stage going for watermarks).

Thanks in advance!!

Evie : )