Security - How can I disable the image download for my portfolio?

[dimitaretch]

Hello,

 

How can I disable image download for my galleries and prevent:

 

1. Right-click on the image -> Save As

2. Save offline copy of the whole page

 

Regards,

Dimitar

[joshroot]

You can't.

 

More importantly, disabling right-click does absolutely nothing in terms of preventing image theft. Show me a website with right-click disabled and I would be able to swipe the image in mere seconds. The only way to be 100% sure that nobody can steal your images is to not put them online at all. Otherwise I suggest watermarking and uploading only screensize images.

 

In all honesty, the worry about people "stealing" images is overblown. I have had images online for 8-10 years now. Have I had some stolen? I do not know, probably a few. But the overall benefit to having my images and portfolio online has VASTLY outweighed any theft that has occurred. Even when measured only in dollars, the value of the work that I have gotten because clients were able to look at my work online is 10, 50, or even 100 times higher than any money I might have lost because someone used an image without paying for it.

[dimitaretch]

Thank you for quick answer!

Is there a way to download all my images using FTP?

[bobatkins]

No. you can't download the images via FTP.

 

Don't post anything large enough to be worth stealing and add a copyright watermark to your images if you're really paranoid about "theft". In practice, as Josh says, it's really a non-issue.

[dimitaretch]

Thank you!

[photomark]

Josh, I agree with you 100% on the futility of trying to prevent unauthorized image use on the web via the various tricks

that only serve as stumbling blocks to your customers while not preventing people from nabbing the images. On the

other hand, image 'theft' is rampant on the web. I've been playing with the beta-test of tineye, which is a true image

search engine--it doesn't work like google's but rather analyzes the image itself and can find matches based on an

uploaded image or an image url. It was eye-opening. Even though tineye says they have only crawled a small fraction of

the web I found photo usage all over the place--not just blog kiddies and myspace pages, but magazines, real estate

agents, and other people who one would think should know better. I tried a random image of the week and tineye turned

up 66 results hosted all over the world. Of course I have no idea how many of those are authorized, but I suspect a

small percentage.

 

I have a few invites for the tineye beta test--if you or Bob are interested in trying it out and don't already have access,

drop me a line and I'll send you an invite. I have no intention of removing images from my website because of this--as

you mentioned, it's the price of doing business, but if the orphan works copyright legislation gets passed technology like

this is going to become pretty important because it may be helpful in tracking images back to their rightful owner.

[JDMvW]

Hope more will be posted on Tineye as it develops.