Image protection
 

I know about placing a 'watermark' into an image to protect copyright but what other ways are there to protect an image on the web?


Incog. :)

Re: Image protection
 

you can disable right clicks on a page to stop people from easily copying and pasting the image. There used to be a thread about it on here, but i can't find it now.

It involves putting javascript on the site, and when people try to right click or use the ctrl button it will popup with a message saying it is not allowed.

Edit: there is a script here that should do it

Re: Image protection
 

Or put them into locked flash files.

Saying all that, there's no way to stop anyone using something like SnagIt, which captures whatever is on the screen at the time to a JPEG.

Re: Image protection
 

Nothing to stop people pressing the print screen key either and just pasting it into Photoshop (or whatever) or disabling javascript in their browser which will allow them to right click.

Re: Image protection
 

The thing about that is, that if someone wants the image all they have to do is disable javascript so it's not much of a protection. Disabling right-clicks can really really annoy people who rely on right clicks for mouse gestures.

Re: Image protection
 

http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozi...EADME.html#new :D

Another web annoyance destroyed by the world's best browser... :pp

Re: Image protection
 

So the watermarking is probably the most effective method then?


:)

Re: Image protection
 

Disabling right clicks is a good way yes. Unless you use your head and just go into source and get the image from there to copy ;)

Re: Image protection
 

Yep, even better would be a PHP or Perl script to do it on the fly so you wouldn't have to alter the original images.

Re: Image protection
 

Or the Flash. It depends what you have got that needs protection, like anything really. If you've only got a few tins of paint in the garage, you'll probably not bother locking it. If you've got a Murchielago in there you'll want to stick and alarm on it.

Even if you're watermarking, bear in mind that you would still need to find some way of tracking the image's useage.

Re: Image protection
 

In my personal experiments when this topic came up before I found watermarking to be totally ineffective. I added a watermark to an image using PSP7. I can`t remember precisely what I did but I think it was to then scale the image up by a factor of 2, sharpen it, blur it, scale it back down again and ended up with an image that was perceptibly no different from the original with the watermark removed.

Re: Image protection
 

Actually apart from my own art work I've not got anything else to protect and frankly I'm flattered if folk want it.If anyone wanted to use any of my graphics I would not mind.

I was just asking out of intellectual curiosity.

:)

Re: Image protection
 

Disabling right click on the site nah people can get around that too easy.

Re: Image protection
 

If you want to take an image from a site and have the nouse its pretty easy. Even with right click disabled, you can view source or edit in frontpage and the image location will be displayed.

Images are cached on the viewers PC. They can trawl through the cached files.

Watermarking will provide provenance, but not stop copying which is an impossiblity anyway, however disabling right click or similar will stop many less educated internet users.

www.thesun.co.uk seems to have a very elegant right click solution, works on text, not images.

A copyright notice should also be prominantly displayed on your site.

Re: Image protection
 

This is effective against peeps that can't read Javascript ;)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/altisuk/gokyo/index.htm

Re: Image protection
 

dont know what you mean :confused: i can copy images from your site just with a right click, and save image?!

Re: Image protection
 

Click on one of the thumbnailed pictures then try and save the one that pops up, it won't do it, it'll only save a small useless gif.

Re: Image protection
 

Falls foul of my firewall/active content blocker = blank page - I really HATE sites that rely on script and other stuff being enabled.

Methods of protecting images.
1. Watermark (light) ... can often be filtered/removed
2. Watermark/stamp (heavy) ... needs to be irritating to be effective
3. Rightclick blocking ... easily defeated
4. Dicing ... quite a useful technique, as it makes SAVE difficult
5. Overlay DIV, with a transparent GIF (catches out careless savers)

If you can see it, though, you can screengrab it!

Re: Image protection
 

That's very clever, and will deter the casual image grabbers. Another method I've seen loads a section of the image, together with the other sections - but they are separate images....not sure how you make sure they appear correctly though.

Re: Image protection
 

Hmm, does Incog want to prevent people ripping off her awards?
lol

Re: Image protection
 

No I was just really interested in the subject.Mind Matth's last explanation went over my head a little.Could you explain it for novices please?


Incog. :)

Re: Image protection
 

For you incog....

1. watermarks can be removed, as described previously, using programs such as photoshop.
2. heavy watermarks will interfere with the image too much to be worth it.
3. rightclick blocking can be defeated quite easily so not too much point in doing it, someone who is determined will still get the images.
4. dicing, dividing the picture up into pieces and then hosting all of the pieces next to each other, so it appears as if it is 1 image, but if someone tries to save the image they will have to do it for each section, and then reassemble them again.
5. Overlaying is putting a transparent site on top of the image you want to protect; then if someone tries to highlight it or right click and save, it will save the transparent image instead.

hope that helps :)

MB :monkey:

Re: Image protection
 

Thank you.

So if one spent a long time over the dicing method you could deter all but the most dedicated?

Though I guess screengrab would work but would the resulting images be much good?

Incog. :)

Re: Image protection
 

personally, i think all of the methods mentioned will deter all except the most dedicated, so it is upto you which you want to use. Watermarking will mess up your images, but on the other hand, dicing will take a long time to do.

IMO disabling the right click is the best option, because you just have to copy the javascript from somewhere are paste it into the source code. If you use something like Dreamweaver then you can make a template which has the script and any other standard features of each page in automatically.

as for the quality of the screenshot... attached is one that i took while i was typing this, cropped to focus on the smilies section.... saved as a bmp, but the quality is still reasonable.

MB

Re: Image protection
 

A screen-grab will have perfect image quality. All the user will need to do is crop it accurately and then compress it to a jpg, png or gif as appropriate and they will have a file as good as your original. If you can display it then there is always a way to save it.

This is why I didn't bother to hard to protect my images. Instead, I concentrated on deceiving any mischevious user into thinking they have the image when, in fact, they haven't. I use something like the overlaying technique described by Matth. Unless there is a package that can do this for you, I imagine that dicing will take a long time.

One other way I have noticed, is to convert the image into a Flash movie. These cannot be saved using a right-click but again they can be screen-grabbed.

Re: Image protection
 

yet again thank you for the info.
I've learnt a lot from such a simple question though I'm not sure I can be a*sed to even try to protect any images.I think that the simplest way,if you don't want your work pinched,that you shouldn't put it on the web.

Incog.:)

Re: Image protection
 

You could always just say "please" ...dont pinch em they are mine...lol

Re: Image protection
 

Who do think will pinch them ?