How do I lock an image?

[penpizazz]

I would like to know how you make it so people cannot save a copy of an image I have on my website to their hard-drive. I am creating unique pieces of drawn art and want them to be viewable and printable, but not sharable.

Does someone know the code to put in or where I can go find it?

Thanks so much for your help.
Penpizazz

www.finelyfinished.com

[scrubz]

The easy answer: You can't lock an image. There are ways the user can get to the image in their cache, by directly linking to the image, etc. There are tricks to make it more difficult to save the image, but they aren't full-proof and there are always ways around them, so I wouldn't even bother.

You're probably best off by putting a watermark or some type of copyright text on the images to discourage users from using the image in their own work.

[Skunk]

Digital watermarking is definitely the way to go - there are methods of making it a tiny bit harder for people to pinch images from your site (like disabling the right mouse button with an irritating script) but all they will do is seriously annoy genuine visitors - the image theives will easily by pass them.

Remember that if the image can be displayed on a monitor in windows, you can always hit PrintScrn to copy the entire screen to the clipboard (then paste it in a paint program and trim off the bits you don't want).

Photoshop has built in support for digital watermarking (as far as I know) so that's the way to go.

[gthorley]

From everything I have read on this subject what your trying to do is impossible.

The best you could do is use small images that have been reduced in size which if someone tries to save and print or use will look awful if enlarged.

You could place fullsized images which have not been compressed which could be printed if thats what you want on a password protected directory and only allow those who have paid access to them.

By the way your site is very impressive and my compliments to whoever created it. It took a while to load some parts of your site and the name members.home.net kept appearing. Do you realize how crowded and slow @home can be? I know because thats where our site started http://members.home.net/gthorley it is still there but just to redirect old search listings. It will be a turnoff to your potential customers to sit waiting for pages to load.

[penpizazz]

These images are part of a paid online-subscription (password protected) of scrapbook page ideas using my art. So I want the subscribers to have the ability to print these images for their files. I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep one person from paying for the subscription and then sharing the info. with 300 other friends.

I'm doing a free two month trial right now to help me figure out what subscribers will want and how I want to run the subscription. The webpage includes a 72 dpi image which they can print out, but many of the subscribers want access to a 200 dpi image (because it prints out better.) Most people like being able to download a MS Word document containing the 200 dpi image. But about 5-10% of the people can't get the document to download. I thought of having a 200 dpi image up on the webpage that they could right-click on to save to their hard-drive. That also works for all but about 5%. My concern with both of these options is that they can just email the image or Word doc. to anyone not subscribed. Maybe this is just a risk I have to take?

I'm starting to think that I will just have to make my subscribers very aware of my copyrights and exactly what their rights are (on a monthly basis). I'm trying to believe that my subscribers will be honest (but you never know).

If anyone has some pearl of wisdom that I haven't thought of, it would be greatly appreciated. Since I'm pregnant I can only do so much analizing...by brain has turned to swiss cheese.

PS - gthorley - thank you...proud to say I designed it...learned HTML all by my little ol' self. Would you mind emailing me privately so we can discuss your thoughts about @home? finelyfinished@home.com

[Skunk]

The situation you are describing really is a text book example of a case where you should be using digital watermarks. You can read more about digital watermarks here:

http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/d...watermark.html

[honging]

If I'm not mistaken, one very tedious way to do it would be to throw it into a Flash file (that would be very time consuming though). Make the flash file non-downloadable, and you have *some* protection. Then again, someone can just screenshot the image and crop out the desktop =/

On second thought... digital watermarking would be the best way to go