Prevent Image Theft

how can i prevent people from stealing my images ?

i have seen a site funny4myspace dot com using z-index when you right click on the image a blank.gif is saved instead of the original one ..

can someone people help me not it .. i can't get it working since i have a list of images from a folder with all different sizes..

please help ..

thanks

 

Disable right click, might lessen the theft...

 

Watermark the images with your logo or site name so that people do not want to steal them. That's what photo sites like iStockPhoto does.

There isn't any way to prevent people from stealing your images on the web. All they have to do is look at the code and they will see the path to your images and the file names.

Disabling right clicks and using z-index will stop newbies from stealing images, but you cannot stop someone who knows how to read HTML and CSS code.

 

Hi,

You can stop people from linking to your images by checking the referer and see if any other site has linked to them.

You could try disabling right click, however all you need to do is turn JS off on the browser to get around it.

Z-Index is a good one for most users, but like TechEvangelist pointed out - Anyone with a bit of HTML/CSS knowledge would be able to figure it out in seconds.

I suppose you could try all three, not to mention watermarking your website URL into the image (at least if they're stealing them they'll have to edit them first)

Regards,

Steve

 

watermark each image is the best way to prevent image thief

 

Place the Image as a background in an <img> tag, that way the image is actually blank and what they are seeing is the background "wallpaper".

tag:

<img id="image" src="" width="32" height="32" alt="">


css:

#image {
background-image: url(../Images/ajax-loader.gif);
}

Be sure the url points to a protected folder.

 

Watermark is the only way as someone could just take a screen shot and crop it either. You could also use mod rewrite to stop users from hot linking to your images

 

You can use some Flash to embed images

 

Put a small watermark on the image.

Do not initially use mod rewrite to stop users from hot linking to your images. If people can not hot link your images, they are more likely to copy them. Only stop hot-linking if you have a bandwidth problem.

When you do have a bandwidth problem do not use the normal ways to stop hot linking. Get a custom no-hot-linking script written for you that can look up the country that an IP is from. If the IP requesting the image is from the same country as the IP of the referring page (the webpage hot-linking) show the image as normal. For every other country show an image with your url on it.
What this will do is this: If an American webmaster hot links your image on his American hosted website, you will get free advertising to every non-american visitor he gets, will make his site look bad to all non-americans and he will never notice (he can not be too smart if he is hot linking).

 

Even if you do that, they can just copy the image by taking a screenshot.

 

That would be a lengty process and quality wont be that good

 

Watermarking is really the only foolproof way to protect your images.

Disabling the right-click ability not only doesn't work but will also alienate the people that use it for legitimate purposes. You don't even need to switch off JS either. (hold right button down, press enter to ok dialog box, then release right button).

Disabling hotlinking from .htaccess prevents people linking to your images but doesn't prevent people copying the image onto their server and linking to it from there.

Watermarking seem to be the only effective solution and will even prevent people taking screenshots.