How to protect your images online

Every image that photographers or graphic designers create matters a lot for them. These photos are their piece and in every piece, it represents their selves. Hence, if someone stole their piece, then they have stolen the identity and personality of the artist as well. That might be the reason why photographers and graphic designers especially the professionals tend to be worried about their piece uploaded on-line to be stolen by someone else and use it for something without having any compensation at the artist’s end. Here are some tips on how to protect your images on the Internet from potential thieves.

Use visible Watermark

A watermark is actually an image, text or pattern that is overlayed in an image. The overlayed image is at low opacity for it to appear transparent but still visible and recognizable. You can add watermark at your image using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Picasa. This might deteriorate the quality of the image but this will make the potential thieves think twice to copy your image for they will edit the picture first and take a lot of time editing before they use it somewhere else.

Disable right click menu

Basically, we just download images from the internet by doing “right mouse click” then “save image as” depending on the browser that you are using, this has been made possible because the developer have activated or enabled the “Context Menu” or the “right mouse click feature” of the page. For your image not to be copied that way, you must disable the “right mouse click” feature. Developers use script (usually Java) to block right clicks. This trick might not work to the experts for they know the weakness of the script but this will stop the novice users to copy the images directly that you have posted using “right click”.

Use Flash

Aside from Flash’s interactivity to audience and amazing animation features, utilizing flash for web would also be a great help in protecting your images. Flash disallows the audience to copy and paste any content from the page. Some developers do allow it, but only few. This trick is quite effective to those who are novice. Although the users can make use of the print screen feature of the computer, then crop it, but this takes time and may decrease the quality of the image thus making the potential thieves think twice to use the obtained image.

Shrink wrapping

Shrink wrapping is just like putting a film covering to something. For online images, you are actually placing a transparent .gif file like a film to the image that you are protecting and as a result, when the potential thieves copy the picture using “right mouse click” they will not notice that the object that they have downloaded is a blank image. Although the users can use print screen and have a screen shoot of your picture then crop but this will deteriorate the quality of the image and takes time to edit.

Image Slicing

Literally, this technique actually implies to slice the picture. You will post your sliced photo using a table with 0 cell padding and 0 cell spacing. The number of cell must also equate to the number of slices of your photo. Using this technique, the photo that you have posted will appear as a complete and unsliced image, but if the audience will try to download the image using context menu or the “right mouse click”, they would only get a part of that photo. A sliced image posted in a site will look perfectly complete.

Upload low resolution images

Higher resolution images encourage users to steal your images. When you post images online it would be better for you to upload them at low resolution. Resizing image can be done using a photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop, Picasa, and Corel. The audience will not be tempted to download you images because this will just ruin their project and will not be able to use it for high quality projects. I found this effective for both novices and experts.

Conclusion

Don’t upload your images online if you want to be 100 per cent sure. No matter how you protect your images online, the risk for theft is still enormous. Your images are viewed worldwide and you can’t image how many people around the globe want to have your hard worked images without providing any compensation or even credits.