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protecting images.......

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 5:55 pm
by dull1554
I'm developing a website for a industrial photographer and he wants to sell some of his prints on the site, but he wants to make it so that a user is not able to save and print the image themselves, i know you can disable right-click with JS, but is there a way to make a image impossiable to save, even if you go to File->Save, and save the entire page?????

any suggestions or ideas, would be great.......just not too sure as how to go about it.........




thanks a mill

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 5:56 pm
by uberpolak
No. No matter what you do you can always make a screenshot. There's no way to do this, if you really want to make it secure, make the web versions of the graphics say "SAMPLE" or something like that across the picture, thus rendering them useless without a purchase of the original.

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 6:02 pm
by dull1554
i know that you can make a screenshot, and that you cant stop that, are you sure there is no way to encode the image or something like that so that if its saved it just turns into gobleygook......

or maybe put them into a flash file, is there a way to make .swf files with php or another language????

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:46 pm
by dull1554
is there a perfered way to protect images

like "sample" across it, or puting it in a 1 frame video or something like that, or is there a way to make it so if the person downloads the image it turns it to junk

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:50 pm
by tim
not that I know of..

How I did mine (which isnt safe at all) was I used javascript to disable the right click function of the mouse... anyone with a image ripper (psp, etc) can steal it... plus, once a user visits the site, most browers will download the image(s) into a temp folder for easy/faster loading on the next visit to the page.

Just more to think about, no way you'll get it 100%

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:03 pm
by Illusionist
no clue on hwo to protect your images, well i might, but yto make .swf you need FlashMX by Macromedia... not that hard to learn if you know bit of Java, plus there are abundant amounts of resources available, as are with any programming language now!

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:22 pm
by John Cartwright
best thing to do is load up photoshop

-put the image on layer 1
-make another layer (layer2) on top of layer 1
-put some big text over the image ie. SAMPLE
-set the transparency to like 20%

now it wont matter is they download it or not... no one would like to see sample over the img :p

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:25 pm
by dull1554
is there a way to overlay transparent text using GD, cause i don't want to have to change the images by hand

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:27 pm
by mrvanjohnson

No.

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:32 pm
by Brian
dull1554 wrote:or maybe put them into a flash file, is there a way to make .swf files with php or another language????
You can make Flash files with PHP, but people can still make screen shots no matter what. As others have suggested in this thread, you may wish to put some kind of text across the image. You can also simply not post high-resolution versions of the images; presumably, the prints would be from the highest-quality originals, but Web previews need not be.

You may also wish to look into digital watermarking, such as that offered by Digimarc right in Photoshop.

That is a Very Bad Idea.

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:41 pm
by Brian
tim wrote:How I did mine (which isnt safe at all) was I used javascript to disable the right click function of the mouse...
When you disable contextual menus for your Web site, you may cripple several functions of your visitors' browsers that have nothing to do with protecting your images (navigation, bookmarking, properties, translation, toolbar options, etc.), which the method fails to do anyway. As with blocking text selection and combination keys for opening links in new windows, blocking contextual menus is rude and more likely to annoy and alienate your visitors than to protect anything.

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 10:06 pm
by d3ad1ysp0rk
Illusionist wrote:but yto make .swf you need FlashMX by Macromedia... not that hard to learn if you know bit of Java
Why do you need to know Java to learn flash..?

Actionscript != Java || JavaScript :wink:

Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2004 3:39 am
by Dr Evil
All can do is repeat what others said before.
Once somebody sees the image on his screen, he has it ! There is no way you can show the image and then take it back.

Your only solution is, as mentioned above, to add a very visible watermark.

Dr Evil

Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2004 4:17 am
by JayBird
Haven't we been here before - viewtopic.php?t=12675&start=15&postdays ... ht=protect image

There are ways to not allow
Saving from the web page and contents with mouse and browser commands.
Site and file grabbers, search and spider programs.
From browser cache or the Temporary Internet Folder.
Screen capture programs and PrintScreen.
Piracy and redistribution of server hosted files

Read all my posts on the link i gave above. There are some links to plugins that will protect your images.

Im not saying this is the best solution, but it is a solution.

Mark

Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 6:59 pm
by dull1554
is there a simple way to overlay transparent text using GD