How do I stop people cutting and pasting certain images?

[Luddite]

Hi

We're about to add an 'art' section to our website. Is there a way I can stop people cutting and pasting images?

Cheers - Nick

[Bob Isaac]

This has been covered before on this support forum, often called anti leeching. Basically, you can't. When someone opens your page in their browser the files are on their hard drives in the browser cache folder(s).

The best suggestion is to put a watermark on them all.

Bob

[MDS]

I have come across a few sites that prevent right click, save as.

Generally manufacturers-heaven knows why as we are selling their products

Try a google, had a lot of results with some code-may be usefull

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/noright.htm

http://www.codelifter.com/main/javas...ghtclick1.html

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...ht+click&meta=

[Bob Isaac]

You can disable the right click and you can disable the image toolbar that appears when you place the cursor over the image, but you cannot prevent the image being downloaded into browser cache.

Bob

[B_Online]

There is nothing stopping people from clicking ctrl + A and copying and pasting the images that way, even printscreen, plus its very easy to go to File and save the page as html etc…a good deterrent would be to use a watermark with your address and copyright info across your images, if you have loads of images it wouldn’t necessarily be a pain you could create the watermark once and by using the Action Record function in Photoshop you could assign this action to a folder that contains all your images and Photoshop will automatically apply the action containing the watermark to all images inside that folder.

For a Watermark Try this:
Just in case make sure you have back ups of all your images!
Open your image in Photoshop
Click on the text tool in the tool pallet (this will create a new layer)
Choose a wide and /or large style font (works well with a wide font)
Type your copyright text
Right click the text layer and choose ‘rasterize layer’
Making sure your new rasterize text layer is selected, go to ‘Filter | Stylize | Emboss
Settings e.g. Angle 135
Height 4
Amount 100%
In the layers pallet choose from the drop down menu Hard Light or Soft Light or even Overlay; if none of these are what you want try reducing the Opacity, or play around with others in the drop down menu.
NOTE: Instead of using Text you could use another image or your logo in the same way.

If you wanted to use this on many images you could create a new Action name it Watermark and click Record, now everything you do in Photoshop is recorded within this new Watermark Action, now follow the above and when finished click Stop at the bottom of the Actions pallet. Now if you want to add this Watermark to a folder containing many images go to File | Automate | Batch
In the Action drop down find the new Watermark Action
Source = Folder
Click the Choose button and find the folder where your images are
The rest is quite simple but optional.
Click OK

Hope i haven't missed something...

[Luddite]

Thanks all - this is really really helpful - I'll let you know how I get on.

Could someone clever have a look at this website: www.tylerwhittle.co.uk (one of my suppliers) - it appears that you can't copy the images from this website - how has this been done?

Appreciative, as ever......

Nick

[jont]

Looks like they have disabled the right click - however - as discussed above there is a work around - simply view the sorce code and you will see the path to the images - enter this into the browser and you will view just the image only and you can right click to save - assuming you have their permission

Is it just my connection or is that site awfully slow to load?

[Luddite]

Is it just my connection or is that site awfully slow to load?

Hard to judge this morning - everything seems to be loading slowly for me today.

Thanks for having a look Jont - think i'm going to go with the watermark suggestion.

Cheers - Nick

[jont]

Watermarking is the only real option - even that can be removed if the user wants to clone it out but that needs real dedication and patience - either watermark just a lower corner - as per eBay to save the image quality but makes it more nickable - or overlay the main image with a semi-transparent watermark - this makes it less appealing but less nickable. As ever it is a trade of between making the site user friendly so they buy and not Fort Knox so it looks a pig.

Another option may be to slice the image - again this can be put back together again if someone really wants it but it will deter the majority

[Luddite]

Another option may be to slice the image - again this can be put back together again if someone really wants it but it will deter the majority

What does that involve?

Nick

[jont]

Literally chopping the original image into several smaller slices - you can do this in most image editing packages - you then "reassemble" the slices in a HTML table so it looks like 1 complete image - if the user right clicks to save they will just save the 1 slice they click on and not the whole image.

This is straightforward for regular HTML work but would require setting up a new product template and replacing the NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTIMAGE with say a 5 row table - inside each cell use a CUSTOMVAR:SLICE1, CUSTOMVAR:SLICE2 etc and then specify the CUSTOMVAR slices against each product. This is a pain to implement but depends on how serious you are about preserving your pics

[Luddite]

Blimey - I'll stick to the watermark I think!

Nick

[B_Online]

There is no 100% way to stop people from stealing your images but the harder you make it the less likely anyone will steal them…Jont is right and if you go to your suppliers website and at the end of tylerwhittle.co.uk you type in /w03/ or /s04/ …w03 meaning winter 2003 and s04 meaning summer 2004 etc you will see a full listing of all images in each folder.

The option of slicing an image up is very effective and if you were using a large image or an image you really would prefer no one steals I would recommend the slice option in conjunction with a Watermark, bearing in mind it wouldn’t take long for someone with medium knowledge of Photoshop or other image editing package to reconstruct and erase the Watermark.
But it’s more work and less likely the average surfer would steal any image which is sliced and watermarked.

Photoshop has an easy slice tool option,
Simply open your image
Choose the slice tool from the tool pallet,
Drag the slice tool across the image or however you want to slice up the image,
Go to File | Save for the web
Choose Jpg and click ‘Save’
From here you might want to create a folder to keep these sliced images separate
And all your slices will be automatically named and saved in that folder

Use Jont’s directions above on how to implement them in your web page

[freakmode]

We used this product a while ago. Its quite cheap and works really well.

WaterMarker

[jan_Hampshire]

An alternate suggeation:
A lot of sites selling photo images, eg aerial photos, yachts etc, simply publish thumbnails on their website that are just big enough and have just enough resolution to discern the image, but not enough to make copying it worthwhile ...