Do you take photographs? Do you upload them online?

Well, if you then you probably know that once your images are online, anyone can get access to them, right? Once your images are online, they can easily stolen. If someone is serious about stealing your images, there is not much you can do once the images are online.

But there are a few things you can do.

1

Make it clear on your website that images are copyrighted and that the rights to images are reserved. The footer of your website should have the copyright information. It might be for example statement as such:

 © 2008-2012 Marek Mularczyk. All rights reserved

This states that the content on the website is copyrighted and viewers should respect that, otherwise they will be breaking the law downloading your content.

2

You can disable right-click on your website. This doesn’t prevent the user to view your code and get access to the images, but it may make it harder for most users to download your images.

Here’s a link where you can find a script for disabling right-click on your website:

Disable right-click on your website.

3

Put your images in the background with CSS and insert a transparent image (GIF or PNG) on top, so when the user tries to save the image with right-click, they will save the transparent image instead.

4

Place small, low-resolution images on the website. Use Photoshop (or other image editor) to compress images. In Photoshop, use Save for Web and compress your JPEGs to 50-60% so even when they get downloaded the quality will be quite poor.

Also, your images should be 72ppi, so they wouldn’t be suitable for print but would be good for screen display. If you use Photoshop, Save for Web saves images as 72ppi images so you don’t have to worry about that.

5

Watermark your images. Put semi-transparent text or image over the photograph to make it harder for the thief to use your image somewhere.

Otherwise, don’t put images online if you want to avoid them being stolen.