Blocking image downloads

[mark4man]

hello again...

My web site is beggining to have photos displayed that are sensitive in nature to the contributers. I have been obtaining photos of historic railroads from local history legends...& most of them will only agree to let me use their materials if I give them credit (which I always fully intended to do)...& also if I block users from downloading the photos (By right clicking & choosing 'save target as' & other methods).

So I'm told that the various java scrips around for this task do not work or can be easily disabled. I'm told the only code type fix for this is to locate the photos in tables, as a background.

never learned how to use tables...started w/ CSS right away; & I'm not even that good at it. what I do is locate all my material (graphic & otherwise) in child layers, inside a parent layer, for the centering of the parent layer when browser size is maximized. works well for me & my site looks fairly nice.

so my question is...since tables cannot be overlapped (I sometimes display my photos overlapped on their corners)...

...can I place a table inside a layer...?

thanks,


mark4man

[piskie]

Before you go to too much trouble, if you point to a background picture in a Table or Cell within a Table, you can still Right Click and view background. Or at least you can in My version of Fireworks and I'm pretty sure you can in IE. This loads the Background Image into a Browser window on its own.

But the main thing to remember is that generally, if a visitor is clever enough to save and use your Pix, they are most likely clever enough to get past your measures and steal them anyway.

However, you could try Flash because that does make it a bit more difficult.

[tangor]

Saving flash is not that much more difficult than images. What you might consider is watermarking all images in such way the image remains useful to the site, but worthless to any scrapers.

[swa66]

even the most unskilled scraper could just take a screenshot of his screen while showing your picture and put it in photoshop or the like and use it again.

Anybody halfway skilled can just get the source code regardless and then see where the image comes from and grab it from the server.
Once you serve it up once, it's out. And it won't go back in -ever again-.

[rocknbil]

Hey good to see you around again swa66 . . .

The only protection you would have, and it's still available to members, is hide them behind a login and assure a nofollow for any logged in areas to avoid them coming up in image searches.

Secondly is watermarking, but they can still access watermarked images.