Preventing image theft
Preventing theft of your site’s images is a very tricky business. There are several different ways you can try and prevent thieves, and I’ll attempt to outline the pros and cons of each alternative here for you.
One of the most common ways to prevent people stealing images is to use a right-click disabling script. This is a piece of javascript which, when your visitor clicks with their right button, will prevent them from being able to see that little menu that says “save picture as…”
This can be a good deterrent for visitors with lower intelligence or patience. They simply may not have the knowledge or the time to get round this. However, if your visitor disables javascript, they get the menu back. One way to get round that would be to use javascript to display the image in the first place, though when the visitor turns their javascript off, they won’t be able to see the image at all.
What use is an image people can’t see?
A very time-consuming, although more effective than the javascript way to prevent image theft is to display your image as the ‘background’ of an element, for example a div. You have your picture as the background of the div, and then a transparent .gif in the div itself, sized so that it takes up the entire available space. That way, when people click “save picture as…”, they will simply save the transparent .gif. Annoying, huh? But it works… Most of the time.
However, even if you combine the javascript way with the background way, it is still possible for people to steal your images. All it takes it one key on the keyboard, and a couple of mouse clicks. See that button on your keyboard, the one next to F12, labelled “Prt Sc”? That stands for “print screen”, and it takes a picture of how your screen looks.
So, “print screen” when you can see the picture you’re after; Open up your preferred photo-editing software (yes, this can be done in MS Paint), then hit the “paste” button, trim it to size, and voila!
And so, what have we learned?
The only way to guarantee that your images are 100% impossible to steal, is to not put them on your site in the first place!
