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CreativeTechs's picture
66 pencils

Photographers: Protect your web photos.

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

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rampy's picture
61 pencils

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]

Waleed's picture
535 pencils

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).

suborior's picture
133 pencils

Not to mention screenshots...

- Jeff Yamada
www.suborior.com

Ivan's picture

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.

tripdragon's picture
417 pencils

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

Korteenea's picture
207 pencils

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

ItalianMike's picture
216 pencils

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

mijlee's picture
488 pencils

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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digilee's picture
221 pencils

The only way to stop anyone stealing anything online is to not put it there in the first place.
Simple as that.

take it there > http://www.rickler.com

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