right click protect

how to protect an image from right clicking and saving it

[contentmaster]

Hi!
I visited a site of a group of professionals in the field of finance. The site is very nicely laid out and has some very good graphics (images). I wanted to save one of the images and right clicked on it......A pop up box appeared stating the name of the organisation and thats it....each of the images seem to be right click protected!

How is this done? is there some script used for this or is there some feature in frontpage.need help!

[Jenstar]

There is a javascript that disables the right click function on a page. That company likely has had problems with people stealing their images, so they have decided to disable to right click to deter people from doing the right click + "Save Picture As".

You can always view source to see the exact URL of the image.

[MonkeeSage]

<img src="foo.png" title="Some Yellow Foo" onmousedown="alert('No yellow foo for you, because I know soooo much kool havascript!'); return false;"/>

Jordan

<edit>Keeping up appearences ;)</edit>

[edited by: MonkeeSage at 4:42 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2003]

[claus]

Keep the right click as the alert pops up, then hit the enter or space on your keyboard while holding the right button - this removes the alert and you can copy.

Otherwise, just get the image url from their source code and copy-paste to the address bar. Such stuff is only good for one thing; signalling "hey, i know soooo much kool havascript" it does not protect your images.

/claus

[Ryan8720]

If you disable JavaScript it won't work at all.

[LABachlr]

Can also hit "Print Scrn" on your keyboard, and then go into a photo editor like Photoshop, create a new file, and paste it into that new file (to paste, hit the <Ctrl> key and the letter "v" at the same time). Then just crop it to the image that you want. The only true way to protect your images is to not put them on the net.

[Jingle]

Hello contentmaster,

You can just drag and drop the image.

[liquidstar]

the best way I've found to do this is to cover the image you want protected with a transparent gif.

In tables, set the protected image as the background then put the gif in the cell

Using CSS you can Z-index the gifs over the top.

Doesn't stop Screen Captures or Code Snooping, but works better than the no right click scripts

[Ryan8720]

There is absolutely no way to stop someone from taking your images. If I can see the image, it is already mine. All I have to do is go pull it out of the cache.

[mivox]

Ditto what Ryan said... The "view source" command in your browser is key #1 to image theft. If that fails, a screenshot is foolproof.

[dragonlady7]

Yes, disabling right-clicking won't prevent image theft. *sigh* But I can tell that to my boss all I want and he still wants me to copy-protect our precious screenshots, like our competition hasn't already had the thought to present their information in the same way, and despite the fact that the website project is already weeks and weeks overdue even without all this vanity bullcrap, and our competition will know to view source ANYWAY, while potential interested customers won't and will be annoyed when they can't copy the screenshot to email it to their boss, etc. etc. etc. DUH. It's a WEBPAGE. We're not putting anything confidential on our WEBPAGE, unless we're MORONS. ... Right? Oh dear.
So, thanks for the script. Saved me a bunch of time and breath. We're far more likely to lose customers over it than we are to prevent our competitors stealing our precious little ideas, and I'm still hoping that my schizo boss forgets about it before I get around to implementing it, but at least I'm capable of doing it quickly. WebmasterWorld to the rescue!

[Lundy]

It pisses me off so much to right click to add a site to 'Favorites' and get that No Right Click Error message, sometimes with cutsie-pie text on it, that I just want to steal the images when I didn't even have that in mind in the first place 'cause I am so bummed by the No Right Click error.

Sometimes I just wanted to print out a frame without all the header stuff, so i right click. There are lots of reasons to right click besides trying to steal the images.

Most of the time, I am thinking . Who do they think wants these idiotic 75 dpi images anyway. And of course, I know how to side-step the no-right click stuff. It just seems so juvenile to have the no-right-click error on a site.

[chiyo]

I would say for sites with highly valuable images this is a good idea. I really doubt that more than 5% of surfers would know you can get around it, and of those 5%, the majority would not know immediately the details of how to do it, or wouldnt go to the effort. There are other ways described well above. Basically it deters the great majority of users, but not the serious ones who really want to steal your images for illegal purpose (eg. copying on to their own site or publications), but then these guys are criminals anyway flouting copyright laws.

I Cant say i agree that it is about wanting to show off js skills or having an overdeveloped ego in all cases.

[krieves]

I agree, most casual web visitors have no idea how to defeat a "no right click" script. Even though it's as simple as holding the mouse button and hitting enter. I guess it depends on site owners preference. Since you can't really prevent image theft, does it behoove the site owner to make it more difficult?

It sorta like, you can't keep people from breaking into your house if they want to get in. But, you can make it more inconvenient so they break into your neighbors house instead. :)

[Trisha]

It pisses me off so much to right click to add a site to 'Favorites' and get that No Right Click Error message, sometimes with cutsie-pie text on it, that I just want to steal the images when I didn't even have that in mind in the first place 'cause I am so bummed by the No Right Click error.

I like that! I've done that too, take the image just because I can. I right click all the time, for many reasons. Although I usually have javascript disabled anyway so it usually doesn't affect me.

On the other hand, I hate to admit it, but I'm thinking of trying the transparent gif thing that liquidstar mentioned for a site that I'm doing a lot of photography for.

[tedster]

Another issue here is IE6's image toolbar. If you don't disable that, then disabling right click won't have any deterrent effect, even on the most casual IE6 visitor. This meta tag will turn off the IE6 toolbar for any page:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false">

...and the galleryimg="" attribute will turn it off for any particular image:

<img border="0" src="filename" galleryimg="false">

You can use either true/false or yes/no in both these spots.

[utica]

Anyone have experience using embeded watermarks? I'm considering using one for a commercial photography site.

My understanding is that a spider tries to track down pirated images with the embeded watermarks. Don't know if it's effective. I do kow that this is an important issue for photographers.

[Ryan8720]

You can add water marks, but it doesn't mean if will keep people from stealing. Most people will just edit the watermark out.

[utica]

This product is a digital watermark that is not visible, and to my knowledge not editable.

I agree that you can still steal it.

What I don't understand is how the spider can see the watermark, which I assume is embeded in the binary file.

I also doubt that the watermark will get transfered in a screen grab.

[coosblues]

I've never seen a right click stop script that really was fool-proof. As many have mentioned there are numerous ways around them so I won't tell you any others - as for watermarks - they are about the best you can get because it is embedded in the photo and cannot be edited out. Now, the chance a bot reads it - surely doubt that one.

[sys_tech]

steganography is the art of embedding data into something (images for example) -- screen shots take a copy of the screen memory -- so as long as the image is taken and cropped exactly (people may or may not do this right) then the extra embedded data would be exactly copied as well

often, to clean up an image - such as getting rid of speckles due to a bad scan for example, adjusting the contrast will make it so those things are not really visible to the human eye

so it might be interesting to 'watermark' an image so that only under 'wrong contrast' can one see the watermark

it would have to be done with small dots (white would work fine in most cases) since large patches would look wrong no matter what the contrast level

you wouldnt be able to see it unless you were specifically trying to test contrast of an image

there are many ways of course, this was just one i thought of

J

[sys_tech]

another note about steganography...

one good fortune for the person stealing your images is that once the screenshot is taken, and even if it were cropped exactly right so the image was complete, saving the image would easily disfigure the encoded data

images are RGB by default and not indexed, converting them to indexed to save as a GIF (or if the image were a GIF beforehand so the screenshot is therefore a different format) redoes the entire image without anyone knowing there was once some data there to save

saving an image as a JPG in photoshop... it asks you to select the amount of compression used, so the image is mangled that way too

effectively saving the image unless one saves it in exactly the same form it was before the snapshot... would be the only way to be sure the data were intact, and noone intent upon your image would know to do that