how can I prevent photos on my website from being copied?

[dblohm]

I am building a website to sell my photos. How do I prevent someone

from right clicking and doing a "save as"? I have already

watermarked the images and imbedded the copyright info.

 

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[kelly_flanigan1]

There is none. Strife to imbed some contact info in the file header too. Try to reduce th headache printers get when dealing with customers who "own your images since they are FREE :) from the internet" . Folks download stuff all the time, a pre teenager will crack a disable right click with ease.

[dave v]

It probably isn't worth your while disabling the right click, the photo is downloaded anyway when it's viewed and can easily be extracted from the cache regardless.

 

Instead only display your photos with a maximum dimension of 600 pixels and with the jpeg quality set slow. 600 pixels will look fine on screen but the prints will be poor. This has the added advantage that your site will load quicker.

 

Hoper this helps

 

Dave

[dan_n1]

May be you could try with Image Ready to slice the image in small pieces and load the

pieces on you web page, but I am not sure that the pieces of the image can be put back

together or not because I can't.

[marshall]

The pieces can be essentially "put back together" just by doing a print-screen/paste.

[ted_marcus1]

The quick answer is "you can't." If you put photos on the Web that have any value, someone <i>will</i> steal them. You can either get your knickers in a twist, or (better) consider it a compliment that someone thought highly enough of your work to steal it!

 

<p>The only thing you can realistically do is keep the file size small enough so that it's usable only to adorn blogs and Web pages. The largest images I use are 264x396. Small files also keep load times reasonable for your many visitors who still have dial-up access. Use your Web server's rewrite rules to prevent direct links to image files ("leeching"); that will deter a great many thieves who are too lazy to copy the files to their own servers.

 

<p>I don't believe in watermarking, especially for small image files. Like many ineffective approaches to "protection," it unduly interferes with legitimate use of the image by spoiling the experience of Web visitors. The one exception is a a small set of images I make available for use as desktop "wallpaper" in 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480 sizes. Those have my name, URL, the title, and a copyright notice across the bottom of the images. It's enough to make removing the text very difficult if not impossible, but not enough to interfere with enjoying the images. They're accessible only through a form that spells out the permitted uses, but I also recognize that some people will violate the "agreement." In that case, any unauthorized distribution becomes advertising for me and for my Web site.

[david_senesac]

Related to your concern is a thread I posted on image size of internet website images:

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Db64&tag=

 

One of the main points I questioned is does it matter if some peon copies even a 1000 pixel width image since that can only make for a quality 4 inch or less wide printed image? To the art and craft folks putting little pics of puppies on coffee mugs maybeso but not so for those marketing serious large fine art.

[ron c sunshine coast,qld,a]

what about flash based images?

<P>I've noticed these don't show up in the cache

[dblohm]

Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful responses. - Dave