How to protect images on the Internet
One of the problems for people who want to display original images on the Internet is that anyone who can view the images can steal them. This page provides a few suggestions on how to protect your valuable images.
First of all, understand this: Any image which is displayed in a user's browser has already been downloaded by the user. There is simply no way to avoid this. It's how web pages work. Therefore the only way to be 100% safe is to not put your images on a web page. The suggestions on this page will deter some people and make you a little bit safer, but nothing will stop a user who knows what he is doing.
Our way
We are offering you a great way of protecting your images. You simply give us link to the images you want to protect and we will add them to our database. We will crawl the web trying to find anyone who uses your images and notify you as soon as we discover unauthorized use. We will also notify you if someone try to register your images in our database. The best of all, we will do it for free (up to 5 images).
Protect your images now
Protect My Image |
There are number of other things you can do in order to make it harder to steal your images. Keep reading.
Hide Images from Search Engines
One of the biggest sources of image theft is search engines. Many search engines allow people to search for images, so if you can prevent the search engines from listing your image in the first place, you've plugged one hole already.
To do this, place all your images in one folder and use a robots.txt file to keep search engines out. This is a text file called robots.txt, placed in the root level of your website. It includes a reference to your images folder like this:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Note that this is voluntary for search engines. it won't keep them all out but it will deter the main ones.
Wrap it up in Java/Flash
Embedding image files in Java Applets or Flash files will make it difficult for people to grab your work, and will send most newbie thieves packing.
But it's not that hard for experienced users to dig the files out of your cache, pull the things apart and access the individual images.
And people can still just take a screen shot of the page and paste it into their paint package!
Disable Right-Click
This is a popular trick in which you disable right-clicking with JavaScript code. When a user right-clicks an image to save it, he gets an error message saying that the action is not permitted. This works in most JavaScript-enabled browsers, but not in all.
Disabling right-clicking is a well-known trick and will not deter anyone who knows how to deal with it. Also, because this method disables all right-clicking, it is very annoying for visitors who genuinely want to right-click in the page.
On the whole, the drawbacks of this method outweigh the advantages and it is not recommended.
Cloaking
A lesser-known nifty trick is to cloak images behind a transparent gif. Place the original image on the page in a table or layer, then place a transparent GIF image the same size over the top. When users right-click the image they will save the transparent GIF and end up with nothing.
Watermark
This is a very safe method which protects the actual image, not just the way someone accesses it. Place a semi-transparent line of text (e.g. your business name or domain name) right through the middle of the image, rendering it useless for anyone else.
Obviously this method impacts the way the image looks, and is really only suitable for displaying sample images.
Software Method
There are some specialized software that walks you through protecting your images. Some of them will even protect your web page source code.