Prevent your Images from getting copied

With numerous social networking and picture sharing websites coming up every other day, one happens to wonder if all those personal images that you upload are safe? What if someone downloads it and uses it for illegal purposes?Is the internet safe to save personal information?

I would like to say here that, for a techie it is really possible to download any image from any website. It is next to impossible to make every picture of yours safe online. But then, there are some clever ways to prevent a straightforward download of your images. Read below:

First try to download the below images by using your usual “Save Image As” option from the right click menu option and see what happens

As you might notice, the downloaded image is just a blank picture. It is an easy way to accomplish this, what I have done is made my daughter’s picture as the background to another transparent image of the same size. Here is how you can do it yourself, if you upload an image it will appear like below in your HTML code:

img src=”mypicture.jpg” alt=”” width=”242″ height=”300″

To incorporate the transparent image on top of it, you need to make this as a table as shown in the below piece of code:

table style=”background-image: url(‘mypicture.jpg’); width: 242; height: 300;”>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img src=”transparent.gif” alt=”” width=”242″ height=”300″ /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

 This is just one way of accomplishing the task, you might even think of possibly implementing the transparent image without having to include them inside of a table. Or else you might even disable the “Save As” option in the right click menu option by just including your image in a table  without having the <img src> section inside of the <td>.

 Image protection with a watermark – The most common, and possibly strongest, image protection technique is to place a visual copyright watermark on the image. Image watermarks come in a range of styles: from a full copyright symbol across the image to a small text in the corner of an image containing the copyright symbol, date, and name of the copyright holder. There is a trade off with watermark size: the larger the watermark the less likely one is to download or steal the image, but the larger the watermark the more of a visual distraction it becomes.

Disable right click option – You can possibly think of writing a small Javascript that will actually prevent the right click menu from appearing. This is also one of the common methods implemented in most of the sites to prevent users from downloading the images. You can find many examples of such Javascripts if you google, i will leave this at your descretion to use the most efficient one as per your need.

“NoFollow” for Images – NoFollow tags for your pages will prevent the search engine from indexing the entire page, but what if you want only your image to be “NoFollowed” or not indexed. Then you simply provide the below line in your “meta” section.

meta name=”robots” content=”noimageindex”>

This will put a “NoFollow” tag only for your images and not your post content. Another way to prevent search engines from indexing your images is to include them in the robot.txt file as below:

User-Agent:*
Disallow:/images/
Disallow:/image.jpg

The above code tells the search engines bots or spiders to disregard the “images” folder and also to disregard the “image.jpg” while indexing your website.

These were some ways to protect your images online and prevent them from mis-used or re-used by other bloggers. Do you think you have a better idea in mind? Why dont you share it with us and we can all benefit from the same. Thanks for reading.

Courtesy: Amit Agarwal

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