I'm about to start work on a website to display my work (purely on
a private basis, rather than as a business), and I'd quite like a
way to stop people stealing my images, as has been discussed on
this website several times before. My options at the moment seem to
be:
Disable right mouse clicks
Use a big watermark across the whole image
Use Flash for the website
Disabling right mouse clicks doesn't seem like a feasible option,
because it's easy enough to view source and download the image
directly, or use that horrible Internet Explorer image toolbar to
save it anyway.
Not to mention that there are perfectly valid choices in the
right-mouse-click menu that have nothing to do with saving an
image. What if somebody wants to click on a link and open it in a
new window?
I gotta say, about half the time I see this sort of thing, I'm
tempted to save the pictures off and EMAIL them back to the webpage
author to demonstrate that all they're really doing is annoying
people.
I'm not a big fan of the watermark idea...
This doesn't really stop people from getting the images, it just
stops the images from being worth getting.
but can't
really be bothered learning how to use Flash (I'm building the site
using ASP.NET and I haven't got time to learn how to combine the
two!).
That's a lot like saying you don't know how to combine your
submarine sandwich with your diet coke. They're not at all
mutually exclusive and there's no great trick involved in using
them together.
To use a Flash object in a webpage simply requires a particular
combination of HTML that supplies the correct parameters. If
you're using ASP.NET to generate webpages dynamically on the
server, then you just have to make your script generate (or include
from another file) the appropriate HTML at the appropriate place in
the page.
But even if you use Flash, all anybody has to do is hit the "Print
Scrn" key on their keyboard and a copy of the current screen will
be placed on the clipboard, from where it can be saved off.
One other option I considered was splitting each image up
into, say, four parts and using a cunning table layout to piece
them back together in the browser, but cross-browser compatibility
might be an issue there.
This isn't likely to cause browser problems, but again, all anybody
has to do is use the "Print Scrn" key.
Does anyone have any other ideas on how I can stop people
downloading or copying my pictures and using them as their own?
Thanks, it's much appreciated. Apologies if this isn't the right
forum but I couldn't see any other this message would particularly
fit in and I figured lots of people here will have sites!
It's ultimately impossible. I guarantee you that an experienced
user will be able to get your image no matter what you do. Some
methods may thwart some users, but nothing's going to thwart
everybody.
I love it when I get the chance to use "thwart" in a sentence. ;^)
Mike
