How To Protect Your Images

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rhsunderground

The only way to truly protect your images so that no one may save them onto their own computer is to keep them off the internet. No matter what you do, as long as your image appears somewhere online, [highlight]it is saveable[/highlight] by the user. Right-Click scripts, transparent cover images, and even expensive image encryption scripts can all be avoided. To see how, visit WebDev FAQ's.

The best way to identify an image as your own is to add a watermark in the corner.

felgall

Not only are all images savable by the user but they are also automatically copied to their computer by their browser before being displayed on a web page.

Robert_Wellock

Amen.

thewebman

and that is final. don't ask about it again. lol

bokeh

"Watermarking"

rhsunderground

bokeh wrote:
"Watermarking"

well the watermarking i was talking about was one that is permanently placed on the image, whereas your system is designed to hinder those that use right-clicking to save their images. not fool-proof by any means, but better than attempting to block access all-together.

bokeh

rhsunderground wrote:
well the watermarking i was talking about was one that is permanently placed on the image, whereas your system is designed to hinder those that use right-clicking to save their images. not fool-proof by any means, but better than attempting to block access all-together.

Really? Was the sentence Pass your mouse pointer over the above, before and after demo image to see what your images could look like after "watermarking" with PHP too difficult to understand? In fact the script either watermarks images on the fly or watermarks them and saves them to file. It does not impede right-clicking in any way.

rhsunderground

bokeh wrote:
Really? Was the sentence Pass your mouse pointer over the above, before and after demo image to see what your images could look like after "watermarking" with PHP too difficult to understand? In fact the script either watermarks images on the fly or watermarks them and saves them to file. It does not impede right-clicking in any way.

forgive me - i was in a hurry and didn't take the time to read through the text. i thought it was a mouseover script that had 2 similar images.

bokeh

rhsunderground wrote:
forgive me - i was in a hurry and didn't take the time to read through the text. i thought it was a mouseover script that had 2 similar images.

Well, to be fair, you aren't the first person that has found that confusing. Maybe I should make an alteration to make things clearer.

puneet

Avatar_sg

Sorry if I'm wrong, but doesn't wotermarking save the pictures? I mean, for example if you use the standart PHP functions for overlayng 2 images (the watermark, and the image to hide) you'll have pretty good result at no cost. Recently I had to do such thing (for 1st time ) at Bulgarian Dream Properties site. I think that using the watermark for images that were in the case copyrighted was the best solution

Avatar_sg

Sorry for posting twice - my mistake!

bokeh

Avatar_sg wrote:
doesn't wotermarking save the pictures

It is possible to watermark the image and save it to disk on the server or make the images on the fly each time they are requested. The former method uses less server resourses.

felgall

There are three sorts of watermarks.

A visible watermark in the image file itself (or added on the server before the file is delivered). This is the type of watermark that is referred to when talking about protecting images from being stolen.
A digital watermark embedded into the image itself (eg. digimark). These watermarks are not visible but provide proof of ownership of the image if it is stolen.
Watermarks added on the client after the image is sent. These are a complete waste of time.

Avatar_sg

Perhaps the best way is joining the files before sending them to the client. This way you can show thumbnails without watermark, yet the big image has it. This method is not very fast, cause the server will have to do this every time a picture is shown, but you will alway have the original image, and wilil be able easily to change the watermark

bokeh

felgall wrote:
2. A digital watermark embedded into the image itself (eg. digimark). These watermarks are not visible but provide proof of ownership of the image if it is stolen.

I would advise against digimark. First it is a paying service. Second it increases the byte count of the image compared to the unwatermarked version and third it wouldn't be too difficult to remove (at least the the point of unreadability); the crudest removal method I can come up with after 5 seconds thought is adding some guassian blur but if I had time to waste on this I'm sure I could come up with something more efficient and with more finesse.

bokeh

Avatar_sg wrote:
This method is not very fast, cause the server will have to do this every time a picture is shown, but you will alway have the original image, and wilil be able easily to change the watermark

You don't need to build them every time; you just need to cache them. Before serving the just check the filemtime() of both the watermark file and the original image file and if these are older than the cached version serve from the cache, otherwise build a new image, cache it and send it to the client.

xziled

well actually there is a way to put your image on the internet and no one would be able to see it at all PERIOD.. it would apear as either a plain white pic or black pic or even just a string of weird character code. but yourself on the other hand, would be able to see it. this is a simple trick some parallel web sites use so that only the people with the 'plugin' so to speak can see the image. the images are jpg or gif but with added encoding that only will show if the viewer has the added encoding in a file on their computer

felgall

Any properly web optimized images will not be worth taking for use off of the web. The problem is that lots of people upload versions of their images that are hundreds of times as big as they need to be for web use and therefore contain all of the information needed to use them elsewhere.

Optimize your images before you upload them (keeping a copy of the original on your own computer). If you then also add a watermark into the image then the loss of picture quality in removing the watermark will make the image unusable even on the web.