[SamBam]

I agree. I also just don't understand the logic behind obscuring the most important part of the image, the one that people will base their decision on.

A small, lower resolution image seems ideal. Anyone who's even considering buying a full-res photo isn't going to see a 200x300 image and say "what the heck, I'll just take that instead." If they did, they weren't going to buy the original either.

And if you want to give the users a sense of the final resolution, you could take a corner of the image and show that at full-resolution, while making it clear in the UI that it's only a corner.