"Secured" Graphics

[mnw]

Has anyone tried to "secure" graphics so they either cannot be saved from a website or cannot be printed if they are downloaded? I have a client that wants to put thumbnails of classic car paintings on a website but prevent a visitor from d/l and printing them (he is selling the limited edition of them). Any ideas?

[agerhart]

I know that it can be done with Java........

[Black Knight]

There's at least one commercially available (reasonably cheap) script to do this - basically the call for the image really goes to the script which then shows but protects the image. I don't know how that works about people saving the image from the cache though...

[knighty]

there is a CSS trick which does a similar thing. Basically you can use an empty <span> tag
and set the image as its background. which prevents people from right clicking and 'saving as'

But I dont see how any 'image protection' can really be enforced as all the user has to is hit the print screen button

[typophile]

Visibly watermarking an image with a logo will mean that the user can download it but it will be unusable. In any event a 72dpi jpeg is useless for print reproduction and can really only be re-used on the web. In practice most artists have no problem puting their work online for this reason. Plus if the image is re-used (with your name and url watermarked into it) it is just more free publicity for you.

[typophile]

For an example of visual watermarking go to [photodisc.com...]

[skirril]

A completely different approach would be:

Do not 'secure' the images as such, but make them unusable in other ways: a 320x200x256 color picture at 75dpi looks good on screen, but won't be of much use when printed. Plus, using eg. jpeg compression will make it small, and virtually uneditable.

[skirril]

sorry, just saw that the point was already made by typophile.

please disregard previous post