Best way to not get photos ripped off?

I am a photographer and wish to post several pictures on a website for purchase. What is the best way in Freeway to ensure that they are not simply copy/pasted and printed?

I already watermark the images, but not so much that it couldn’t be cropped in a way that would make it work.

I’m not that big of a stickler, just in debt from camera equipment!

I was just wondering if anyone had a fix-all solution.

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There are scripts like “Image Guardian” that you can buy to use in Freeway that can help prevent this, but the reality is there is no for sure way to block people from copying/pasting, printing your images, or just cmd+shift+4 to screen capture them. The rule of thumb is always to never put anything online you wouldn’t want copied/printed/pasted and unfortunately your business requires you to do so.

Here’s the “Image Guardian” action:

http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=006

Other options would be to scale down your images or degrade the quality of them so it’s pointless to try to modify them. Perhaps someone else can chime in on the subject.

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On 19 Aug 2008, at 04:59, Rocky Slaughter wrote:

I am a photographer and wish to post several pictures on a website for purchase. What is the best way in Freeway to ensure that they are not simply copy/pasted and printed?

I too am a photographer, and I’ve seen this old chestnut come up every few months on every Web design forum I’ve belonged to in fifteen years. The short answer is that there is no way to do it, at all, and my advice would be simply to go ahead and not worry about it.

The longer answer is that there are numerous ways of doing what the particularly paranoid call ‘making it more difficult for them’. These involve disabling the ability to right-click in the browser (bad call — right clicking on many things is an asset to your viewers), placing a transparent picture over the top so that when they try to right-click, they download that instead, and various bits of JavaScript that do weird and whacky things.

Trouble is, there’s no point in ‘making it more difficult’ because it’s laughably easy to take a screenshot of anything visible on the screen, which is basically why all these tricks are pointless. The only thing that’s left is to deface your picture with a watermark (no thanks) or to make it so ridiculously small it loses any impact it might have had.

Best way? Put ‘em up, big and bold, glory in them, feel good about it, show them off nicely, and don’t forget: if someone steals one, they have a bigger problem than you do. It might be an idea to make sure the pictures include all your metadata, contact details etc, which means avoiding Photoshop’s ‘Save for Web’ as it strips it all out.

PS: Come to think of it, there IS one little thing I came across the other day which I don’t dislike: it’s a bit of code that, when you right-click or try to drag, pops up a little message warning you that the picture is copyright of the photographer. That I don’t mind.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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Many of you know that I’m a photographer in my “other life” (http://www.ianschrayphotography.com). I echo Paul’s thoughts completely.

I think it’s appropriate to take a certain amount of work to prevent casual copying. That is, the simple drag-and-drop of images from your site to a user’s desktop. There are tons of ways to do this, and the Image Guardian Action that Dan mentioned is a very good one.

I personally use Weaver’s MooTools Slimbox Action (part of his MooTools Suite: http://www.coastalrugs.com/Actions/mootoolssuite.html). This creates nice slideshows that are impossible to drag out of the browser window.

Still no protection from a screen shot, of course… :-)

-ian

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