Photographers: Protect your web photos.

Submitted by CreativeTechs on Wed, 2005-11-02 20:55.

Member's Forum

Here is a tip for photographers who must display portfolio images on their website. How can you keep people from stealing your copyrighted work?

There isn't a perfect answer. However there are several techniques that make it harder for a casual web browser to download images. One approach is to place your photo as a background image in a one-cell HTML table. The technique is fairly simple once you understand the trick behind it. Here is a diagram to help understand how it works:

Your copyrighted photo is placed as a background image inside of an HTML table cell. The copyright notice (a transparent PNG file in our example) is then placed on top.When someone viewing your portfolio website tries to drag the image to their personal computer, they get the copyright notice instead.

There is a demonstration and tutorial for this technique available at:

http://creativetechs.com/tips/quicktips_66_tutorial.html

Try save Complete Webpage

Submitted by rampy on Wed, 2005-11-02 21:29.

Try save Complete Webpage in your browser (Firefox and IE at the very least supports this), everything will be saved! this is no protection at all!
[removed rude remark]

right-mouse-click?

Submitted by Waleed on Wed, 2005-11-02 22:59.

Hi CreativeTechs,

That will only protect from right-mouse-click & save.. One can even use a java script to disable it and save time, but one can also easily disable java to save the images. As rampy said, saving the entire site would save the images too.

Many workarounds are found for image protection techniques, the best I've found so far are watermarks and low resolution images (which I'm working on now).

Waleed
www.waleedsgallery.biz

Not to mention

Submitted by suborior on Thu, 2005-11-03 01:52.

Not to mention screenshots...

- Jeff Yamada
www.suborior.com

well

Submitted by Ivan on Thu, 2005-11-03 16:19.

As you said it will only protect from the casual user. I would simply view source, search for .jpg and copy the url. Takes less than 5 seconds.

not only that, it is majorly

Submitted by tripdragon on Thu, 2005-11-03 18:19.

not only that, it is majorly rude to do. Dont mess up someone casual web experience.

Alternatively, one could do

Submitted by Korteenea on Fri, 2005-11-04 14:29.

Alternatively, one could do this using a couple of DIV tags and some CSS.

I was about to suggest this

Submitted by ItalianMike on Fri, 2005-11-04 15:02.

Having the image as a background in CSS will prevent people from being able to drag it to their desktop, or alternatively right-click and save it.

Seems like less work as well. But I think we've already established that their really is no bullet proof method.

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Infinite Style

How about this

Submitted by mijlee on Tue, 2005-11-08 01:13.

Big respect to the first person to embed an image in a web page without using proprietary software that is impossible to download (obviously no screen shots).

I doubt if it is possible at all but come on who's up for it?

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http://mijlee.com
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