How do I stop someone pinching graphics?

[aloebridge123]

Hi all,

I'm getting very frustrated this afternoon. I have live help on my site which enables me to see visitors that come and go and where they go on my site. all day today, I have had one visitor downloading images from my site.

I do have the site copywrighted but is there any way in which I can stop this from happening.

I tried to interact with the person to advise that I had a file available which I was more than willing to send but they kept going in to the site and doing it anyway!!

All help is much appreciated - and guess what they have just come back on line now!!!

Linda
www.aloevera-and-you.com

[retekdirect]

Um, what program are you using to track this visitor? Is it related to a visitor coming online and downloading the image files as part of the normal browsing process, or are they physically saving specific images to their computer? If so, how are you able to track this?

Not sure i follow.


Ryan

[aloebridge123]

With the Livehelp function I use, the back office admin enables you to see where each customer goes in the website so you can then offer to help them if needed.

What I was seeing was a customer who was going in and out of every section, every product and every colour which I then made the assumption - as it was the whole site throughout the day that they were saving the images to their computer - probably via right click.

Although I don't have a problem with people using the images, I would prefer them to contact me rather than 'right-clicking' the images if this makes sense.

Linda

[BeerHunter]

...but wouldn't the images just end up in the users browser cache anyways? If they are viewing the pictures in a browser then wouldn't the picture be downloaded to their machine anyways.

Anyways, I can't vouch for this product (and there are several others if you search for them) but here is a link

Protect your graphics

[Bob Isaac]

The process of stopping the aquisition of graphics is called 'anti leeching', and if you do an web search on this you will find a lot of useful reading and lots of suggestions of what to do. A visit to http://www.webhostingtalk.com/index.php is also worth it.

You can disable the browser image tool bar with :
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false">
placed before the </HEAD> tag.

There are some scripts that claim to stop the right mouse click, but what if the user has swapped the settings.

As soon as someone views your page the images are on their computer, in the browser cache. It does not take a lot to find them, but a lot of people would not know where to start.

If anyone wants them they will get them.

The only other option is to watermark them so when you see them elsewhere you know they came from your site.

[jont]

Best to avoid any sort of scripts that disable browser functions as this irritates the hell out of legit users and can be easily broken or circumvented with little knowledge.

Watermarking low-res versions of copyrighted images can be useful but does make the site look messy but is good if you are selling the originals for downloading. You can also split the images into several pieces so they are of less use than a single graphic

If people are hot-linking your images IE embedding the URL on their site to the location of the image on your site this also has consequences with bandwidth on your servers which you may be liable to paying if you are receiving a huge number of calls to your images. This can be overcome (if your server allows) with a .htaccess statement but this can also have issues with search engines caching your images. You can set the .htaccess to replace the images with alternatives if they are being hot-linked - this is best to replace with a small transparent single pixel image if bandwidth is an issue or a nasty image of your choice!

Will you let us all know which route you take and keep us posted with the results as this is an issue affecting a lot of us.

[clogiccraigm]

As far as I can tell, even if scripted events were used to protect a sites' images, it does not prevent an old fashioned "Print Screen".

Best to stick to watermarks if necessary, preferrably small and inoffensive, and breaking the line of a part of the image (which cannot be digitally removed without damaging the feature of an image).

[jont]

As far as I can tell, even if scripted events were used to protect a sites' images, it does not prevent an old fashioned "Print Screen".

It is possible to use a script which clears out the clipboard memory every fraction of a second so a user is unable to paste the image into another program - again this can annoy legit users if say your website is left open in the background and they are trying to use say Word and find themselves unable to copy and paste.