Protecting Images on a website

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Hi All,

I have my site up and running and I am almost to a point to add the images (it's a gallery of my trip).

I wanted to protect the images so people are unable to take them and use them as they are personal to myself and GF but I had this idea and wanted to see it through.

Any ideas or tips?

Kind Regards,
Darren

 

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I'm not really an expert in this, but you could use javascript to disable 'right clicking' any images in your gallery.

Another alternative would be to use a service like Digimarc which digitally watermarks your photos and allows you to monitor and track whether your images are used on any other websites.

 

I'll try both of those and keep looking for more stuff. It was only as a practice so I might not host the site unless I need to show it to a potential employer and come up with a new idea!

Thanks

 

JavaScript is normally the way, but there are always ways around it. It just inconveniences them for a bit.

 

Couple of things:

• Add a watermark to the image in a couple of places.
• Make the images private.
• Also nothing stopping people using the Print Screen button or software to capture the screen.

 

The images get downloaded and stored in the browser cache, anyone with some smarts can get them from there.

You could try setting no-cache http headers on the images, but again someone with some smarts can work around this using curl or wget or custom program most likely or just a poorly conformant browser.

Common techniques tend to be (as mentioned already) :-

1. Making right click impossible with JavaScript and loading the image through obfuscated JavaScript.
2. Watermarks or poor quality thumbnails.

Its possible that maybe you could also do some stenography or encryption in obfuscated JavaScript.

All of these methods just deter people, a decent coder would be able to get round all of them to get the real data. Also any script kiddie can use print screen.

Personally if you don't want people to have them I wouldn't put them on the internet.

 

What dmarsh said! If however you do decide to put them up, then you can also use Google to image search and see if anyone has stolen your pictures and is using them, assuming they are watermarked and protected properly then you would have legal rights I would think to have them removed if anyone does not comply with pulling them down for you.

 

You can serve them from a secure part of your site, but this would require a user to login and kinda goes against the idea of a portfolio to attract business.

Also as soon as you hand out a login you are back to the situation we described above. You could dynamically watermark them based on the login in this instance, but I suspect this is rather more than you wanted.

Some commercial sites also use browser plugins to try to make stuff more secure, instead of using obfuscated JavaScript they code it in Flash, Flash can still be reverse engineered, but its arguably a little harder.

 

I'll take those pictures of your GF down then...

 

Ok so I'm not going to put them up!!

I could do all this but in the end some one will take them then it's more work if I want to pursue the people who do!

I wouldn't mind as mainly they are just pictures of mountains rivers and random things in Australia but it's the principle some one using my stuff without permission.

Thanks guys, now you have to give me ideas for more sites to create!

www.frscdesign.coffeecup.com is the site, the countries are the galleries where I was going to put up all the pictures etc. View in chrome as there are issues with multiple stylesheets which only work in chrome when uploaded the coffee cup S Drive.

Wanted to change the home page to have the main image off to the right with a small intro next to and around it. Then some links, different info small pictures added in underneath to pad it out.