Hi I created a website from scratch using HTML and style sheets by following a "How to...." book so I am at a very basic level of knowledge.
My question is I have photos on my site wonder how safe they are. Can I make them safe? Can anyone copy them? Would a password to access the site help?
Any help will be much appreciated.
Thanks Wendy
The best thing to do is include some form of visual distortion in the image. Overlay them with semi-transparent text of your name or something like google do with google maps. This will at least make it harder for anyone to re-use them.
(It's not 100% perfect though, I'm sure there are techniques for removing overlays)
Alternatively, only supply lo-res versions for free. Make people pay for them if they want high-res copies.
If you reference your photos via
<img src="...."/>
the browser makes a request for those photos just as if you typed that address in the browser window. So any reference like the above is not going to be safe.
Users can also select a photo and (depending on your browser) select the Save As option.
Finally those photos are going to end up in the browser cache, and possibly on a disk.
Some sites will disable the right-click on the document images, but that's not a good fix. If you're worried about this, you can (depending on your requirements) watermark your images so their origin is obvious, or perhaps display via some custom (Flash?) plugin. Users can obviously take a screenshot, but it makes the process a little less convenient.
If you are worrying about people copying nice photos to use on their own sites, books, whatever, you could show watermarked versions of your photos (like the folks over at getty images), and require a login to retrieve the original (unadulterated) ones. This won't prevent images from being copied, but it will make the copied image less attractive which can be a sufficient deterrent.
Password-protecting the site would help. This would keep people who didn't know the password from seeing the photos at all, and then they couldn't copy the pictures. Once they entered the password and had access to the site, though, they could copy the pictures if they liked.
Aside from using lower resolution images, and as Simon mentioned about an overlay, you may actually want to save the entire image WITH the overlay in some secondary directory. Anyone who can do VIEW SOURCE of the HTML, find the image name itself directly can get your image all by itself without any secondary visual blur control on top of it.
is it really worth the hassle to "protect" the images though?
are they examples of your photographic portfolio? if so, they will be in a low enough resolution online to where they are obviously inferior to the originals.
are they just pictures of you and your family or friends? if so, you might just be paranoid.
like what was alluded to earlier, the moment someone even looks at your picture, buy the very nature of the internet, the image has been copied to their computer for viewing.
why fight it?