Internet has many opportunities for sharing tips and ideas, but what is the greatest problem for photographers? Difficult mission to accomplish – to protect your photos! With the “print screenshot” command it makes you feel there is no way to stop stealing and misusing your work. But, there are in fact some ways to harden this process, such as disabling right clicks, adding watermarks and using images as backgrounds.
Search engines are the main sources of the image theft. To hide images from the search engines it is recommended to place all the images in a single folder and use a robots.txt file. This would keep search engines out, not all of them, but the main ones. Disabling right-click is very popular trick working in almost every JavaScript-enabled browser. There are more drawbacks of this method than the advantages so it is not so recommended to use it. Cloaking is lesser-known trick and it can be done when the original image is placed on the page in a layer or a table then the transparent same sized GIF image is placed over the top of it. When users want to save the image, they will save just the transparent GIF image. Watermarking is a good way to protect the actual image and not just the way to be accessed. Semi-transparent text or line can be placed through the middle of the image making it useless for anyone but you. The disadvantage is that it affects the look of image and therefore is not suitable for non-sample images.
It is important to understand that any image that is displayed in users’ browsers is already downloaded by the user and it is the way how web pages work. That is the reason why is it simply hard to avoid this and the only 100% safe way is not to put images on any web page. So, if you are concerned about protecting your copyrights, take a look at ISPhN.org for more tips and ideas.