Thread: Protecting images on the web page

Hi,

I was wondering how some of the Competition is protecting their images (right-click not allowed) and at the same tome prompting that the image is Copyright by .....

How do you do this? I know they can still use a screen capture utility, but still, you want to make it a s hard a s possible for the Competition. Or maybe you can think of reasons why this is not recommended...

Many thanks again.

Originally Posted by Tom vR

Hi,

I was wondering how some of the Competition is protecting their images (right-click not allowed) and at the same tome prompting that the image is Copyright by .....

How do you do this? I know they can still use a screen capture utility, but still, you want to make it a s hard a s possible for the Competition. Or maybe you can think of reasons why this is not recommended...

Many thanks again.

Hi Tom:

There are scripts available for what you would like to do, although not recommended by many experts on this board. It is a good idea to have a line of text in regards to copyright, you can put a small line at the bottom of each of your pages about this, as well, you could have a larger statement under an entire page.

But what you can do with your images, and I find this works really well (kind of fools the person taking the image too) is place over each image a shape, and make that shape transparent (available to do this right in the web builder, blue voda) and then when the person right clicks and saves, they are only getting the transparent image ... I like that solution alot. There are work abouts to grab this as well, but many steps are needed to do so ...

And then of course, there is applying a watermark on your image that will discourage taking your image, but you may not want to mess up your image with that, and if you merely put in down in the side corner or something, they can get the image and crop it .. of course would depend if it was still useful at this point ...

Good luck with your decision.

Some excellent advice there from LE. Some other ways you can protect your images are as follows:


Hide Images from 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.

You can do this by placing 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 and including 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 like Google and Yahoo etc

Disable Right-Click with Javascript

When the user right-clicks an image to save it, they get an error message telling them the action is not permitted. This works in most JavaScript-enabled browsers, but not 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, if you need your vistors to be able to right click on something on your website, you'd be advised not to use this option.

On the whole, the drawbacks of this method outweigh the advantages and it is not recommended but if you still want to try this method then the script can be found here.

I would personaly use LE's cloaking option (hiding behind a transparent shape) as this is a lesser known trick and also harder to overcome.

HTH

Hi, unless your images are worth a lot of money I wouldn’t worry about it.
What are you going to do if someone is using them on their web site that lives on the other side of the planet? (Life’s to short)
I would definitely not block SE’s from your images, unless you would like to take longer to climb up the search engine ladder.
I would also not recommend disabling no right click. Most of them don’t work with all browsers anyway. If you do use one? Make sure the script hasn’t disabled other mouse functions. You will also disable all the other right mouse click functions that you visitors may wish to use.

Good luck.

Thank you all. Yes I thought there may be some issues regarding the right-click protect. One disadvantage of course is if the user must refresh your screen....

The transparent shape over an image makes a lot of sense, in actual fact I have considered that some time ago, but I don't think it will work on the Gallery or on the LightBox. How are you going to click the image to start its thing?

CI is may be right, how much money is your graphic worth. The site I've designed (by the way, this is only phase 1 - just to get the site going. Phase 2 will be the smart making stuff) is for my wife's real estate business and I was just thinking of protecting our clients house photos from competetor agents. But then, all that trouble....

Many thanks for your thoughts. It makes us more knowledgeable.
Have a good one.

You can also store the images in a database so the actual image files arn't available for them to save. This would mean the only way for them to copy would to do a print screen and save it to their computer (which is how they would do it if they don't disable javascript or if you have the transparent image of it). Because of print screen it is impossible no matter what method you use to completely protect you images.

Thank you all. I will create database at a later stage once I know a bit more how to use MySQL.