Web Image Protection

Hey All,

A client of mine wanted to know if there was a way to fully protect the images on their site.

I explained to them that even if I coded their site to disallow right-click (into an alert) and to disable caching onto the viewers site, that there is still the whole deal with screen capture (alt+print screen) where they can take the image and "cut" out the part they want.

So he asked me if there was a way to disable screen capture. I told him that I have never heard of anything like that. Is there anyone here who has?

I thought of maybe something that can blur or scramble the capture or leave the image black. Is it even possible though? Can you affect the data between the computer and the screen?

Somehow, I'm guessing no.

Not many persons know about the whole screen capture process so going with no cache/right-click should be fine...

(BTW, the client is a local artist who worries about image/credit theft)

why don't you turn the images into swf format in this way most visitors can not get their
hands on your images like abc even if the swf file is cached....
there is a trick i don' t know if you are aware of it or not that disables swf imorting you can
use that trick too but i have never heard of such thing as diabling screen capture!

You could make a proprietry image viewer which visitors must download, which displays the images fullscreen on a directdraw (or equivalent for other OS) surface, which cannot (easily) be screen captured.

On the other hand you'd lose a lot of audience that way because many people wouldn't want to download your viewer.

Making them into SWFs won't help, I'm sure it's easy to rip images out of them (and can still be screen captured)

Well, i think i even a photo viewer can be captured anyway, so there is practically no way out of this. The sole consolation is that not even 2% people using the internet are internet-educated and dont know the details of things, so you can make sure that you use black-death's advice, that is the most likely one, because no one wants to go down through the hassles of downloading a photo viewer until you have cindy crawford in the picture album. It also increases a risk of virii.
So, swf is the best option as of now, until of course, somebody can program a software against capturing. Ah, not in the near future !

P.S. -
You can copyright your images to scare people off downloading them and maybe,
using them. Not for sure, but it might help,

I've though about using the whole .swf thing but if I code the site with no right-click or caching, it would do the same.

Like you've all said, most people surfing the net aren't that savvy so most won't think about screen capture.

It's either that or put www.xxxxx.com all over the image in light gray (I always hated that - takes away from the image)

one good trick i liked to use for image protection and other things (not fixing the screen capture thing, but just to keep MOST users from playing around with it)...is to create a blank layer the width of the browser over top of everything. That way, they can right click on the picture all they want, but it won't show them the save as, print, or other things in the image right click menu...

i prefer that to the disable right click because those right click messages are annoying at best.

I've seen a site where when you click on the thumbnail it opens a java applet in another window which renders the pic. It sure as hell made casual capture of the image difficult. But I'll tell ya this much, I'd never use an OS which let some kind of website scripting affect its core functionality, like screen capture......

[shadow]what about breaking the image ...so that when they capture it , it breaks it down in two different pieces.. i seen that happend once when i tried to copy a picture... [/shadow]

As a www is a client server model, for you to see the image is must be on your machine, ie you have downloaded to your machine, which means that you have a copy on your machine.

doktorf00bar talks about the casual capture of am image, you can fool people don't know what they are doing? but there is NO current way to project your image from someone who knows what they are doing.

The two possible ways I would look at would be

1) signing the image(the best would be your name right in the middle of the image), or use low quility images

2)Place the images in area which requires authentification(sp?), this way you can monitor who is allowed to see the images, this is not fool proof as the people you can login will have access to the images.

SittingDuck

There have been a lot of people ask this question before, and it comes down to the old saying "if they want it bad enough they will find a way" With all the ways to view source and download entire sites and print screens, there is no way you can make it "Impossible" for someone to take your images. even if you use low quality or write your logo across them. If someone wants it chances are they will take the time to airbrush logos away and low quality images can be touched up.

On the other hand, most people only take images so they can have them as their background or play around with them. I have heard very little about people stealing photos for profit (using your images as their own.)

.swf can be stole just as easily as any other file and doesnt offer much more hassle, splitting images up is a good idea, but that print screen button fixes that.

The best way to protect your images, is not to put them up. or not to care who takes them.

You can also watermark them with digimarc, which is a useful tool to add copyright embedding into your images. Photoshop has this already built in, and I am soon going to be buying an account, of which you pay per image, and even when altered, the watermark can still be read. It's a little costly, but it depends really on how much your images mean to you, and can be especially useful for graphic designers and photographers.

I believe that you can get a basic membership for a year that covers 50 images for 45 dollars, which is only really a dollar per image...

http://www.digimarc.com/

Well,
If you are really serious about this, I have an idea. You could make a program with the image inside of the executable, possibly password protect the program if you desire, then have it display the image as part of a video overlay, that takes over the screen, disables alt + tab and other windows key combinations, does not allow parameter modifications and only allows the exit of the program once it has opened. You would have to ask someone else who is into image coding and encryption to do this for you, I know I sure would not be able to do it ;). Good luck though, it would be perfectly possibly.