Prevent People From Stealing Images

[ivanmax]

Hi everybody,

 

I am currently designing my second photographer web (first one www.ivangarcia.net not made by me).

 

When I pass the cursor over the pictures a small box on the top left corner appears with simbols that allow people to save the image in their hard drives. How could I avoid this? I know is pretty easy as I have done it before but I can´t remember how.

 

Anybody?

 

Thanks a lot,

 

Iván

[TCH-Thomas]

This can not generally be done in a full proof way.

 

There are however as you say, scripts that can disable right click, save as, and other functions, but if the user have javascript turned off in their browser they can bypass this pretty easy.

[ivanmax]

Thanks,

 

So isn´t there a way of preventing the box from appearing? Where could I find one of those scripts?

 

Thanks a lot,

 

Iván

[nortk]

First off, isn't that box that appears a browser-specific feature? Firefox is not giving me that box. But in Firefox I can right-click and download images that way. The link below provides a script which basically lays a clear .gif directly on top of your image, so that saving the file will actually save the clear .gif instead.

 

But, as Thomas said, anyone who really wants to can find a way to get at your images.

 

http://www.createblog.com/scripts/download.php?id=359

[TCH-Thomas]

There is some scripts for this at Hotscripts.com, but as I said, generally your visitor will only need to disable javascript in his/her browser and these scripts have no effect.

[JTD]

Maybe watermarking them. That does not prevent stealing. But you will have proof that the image is yours if you see it on the web.

[TCH-Bruce]

If they view an image on your site it is already on their hard drive. It's in their cache. All a person would need to do is look at their cache and save the image elsewhere.

 

Watermarking would be your best online solution. Not displaying them at all would be your fool proof solution.

[TCH-Don]

To prevent the image tool bar from displaying in IE use

 

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />

in the head tag.

 

But as mentioned water marking is the safe way to protect your images

[JTD]

Playing around with a free watermarking program I just downloaded. Here is an example. The watermark is circled in red. and here is the link to the software. uMarkLite

 

 

Or in this photo I used an image tag I made with xara3D

 

Edited February 4, 2007 by JTD

[TCH-Thomas]

Nice find, JTD.