@kgnfdeagleDec 16.2007 — #Yes, there is a way to prevent images from being copied off of your website.
The best, most efficient way to protect the image and graphics copyrights within your commercial web projects is to place your images inside a flash element. If you have 20 images on the page, and you wanted them displayed in various locations, you would copy and paste each image into a seperate, one slide flash .fla file. Then you would simply use the <embed> tag to display the images on your website via the flash medium (.swf).
What this prevents:
1.) Users can no longer right click an image to download the image (or save it), because Flash is a proprietary Adobe (Macromedia) technology.
2.) This only leaves one possible way someone could display your file, and that is through direct linking to the file on your server. Even this can be prevented if you have the proper server configurations in place. If you have no idea on how to configure your server, you can encode your HTML file so that users cannot decrypt the source contents when they view the source (thus hiding the file location).
Unfortunately, these techniques require software that costs alot of money. We are talking in the $500 - 1,000 dollar price range depending on which suite you decide to purchase. So for the average joe, there is no way to protect your images from being stolen.
@kgnfdeagleDec 16.2007 — #I did some research to double check on some things, there is actually a software package available called "Flash Saver" that will enable the user to save flash files.
HOWEVER:
1.) This software costs $24.95, and most people are not willing to pay that.
2.) Even this software can be defeated by having your server configured with an .htaccess file
[B]Write the following within your .htaccess file:[/B]
[B]Change 'domain.com' to the name of your domain.[/B]
If you really want to get back at the file stealers, you can create an image that has "STOLEN IMAGE" written on it, and provide that file to the image stealers instead of the one they intend to steal when they link.
@kgnfdeagleDec 17.2007 — #True enough, if the user wants your graphic bad enough they can take a screenshot, bring it into a graphics editor and get it...
So...
Use watermarks I guess is the moral of the story,
But at least you can prevent right clicks and direct linking if you put some time into your projects. This protects your bandwidth and makes it much more time consuming to steal the images.
