I am building a website for a photographer friend. He does high-quality work and, both for himself and for his models, he would like to prevent clip-art-rippers and other shady characters from taking his work and using/abusing it.
Here is where I’m at: I’ve disabled right click with Java. However, XP and other systems have a function whereby, simply by pointing the cursor over the image, the floppy disc image appears on screen and you can save it sans problem.
Thanks for your help with the following questions:
Can one disable the “floppy disc toolbar” so that it doesn’t appear when the cursor is over an image? If so, could you provide the Java script for that?
Is it even worth doing these disablings–that is, will the dedicated rippers get the images at high-quality through screen captures and other methods?
What further advice can you provide on this issue?
I don’t think you can disable screen capturing, but the most effective method I’ve seen is to just have the image visible actually through Flash or Java, then password or lock the file so that if someone were to download the flash file, they’d have to get through that as well, its still not fool-proof, but it will get rid of a lot of people who don’t want to go through all the trouble.
Another method that works fairly well is if the image is not important to the page you could have it appear in another window that closes as soon as the right mouse button is clicked.
I have no idea how to do any of this, except the first part of the first part, but, maybe it will help.
They can screencap, yes. Or they can turn off Javascript and get around it. OR they can look at the source of the page, find the location of the picture, go directly to that URL, and download it that way. No matter what you do, you won’t be able to prevent dedicated and knowledgeable people from ripping off his images if they want to. And the more techniques you use, the more insanely annoying and difficult to use the website will be.
Don’t go to the Dark Side. Just mark the images. Put “sample,” his name, or the URL of his website somewhere on the image, preferably somewhere that people won’t want to crop off. Yes, it makes the pictures look slightly less pretty, but it’s more effective and less annoying than any other method.
As with all the other replys so far , one more option would be to place the photos in a pass word protected directory , that shows up with an error 404 or some other worded message screen.
Unless your photog pal is willing to watermark or spike the image , its going to be downloaded and used for what ever.
I think elfbabe has the most sensible advice. Other than that, only use a low-res version on the website. So they won’t be bad to look at, but not useful for anybody else.