I offer images for professional licensing at negotiable fees and was recently stunned when one of my images was used in a fullpage newspaper ad by a paper in Illinois. A political group ran an ad using this cartoon and as you can see they obliterated my name and hacked the artwork so badly. Had it not been for an astute follower of my work who recognized the style, I probably would never have been aware.
Here is my question: How to prevent image theft / downloading on a WordPress platform? Is there a tweak or line of code I can add in my CSS or some kind of plugin? It’s disconcerting to know there are so many thieves out there when you are legitimately trying to run a professional site. Here is photo of the full page ad:
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Unless you are going to pursue some type of legal action there really isn’t anything you can do. If its on the internet anyone can take it.
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If you’re selling the images, you should have a huge watermark that covers a large area of the image. If you’re not selling them and just want to post a nice image, assume it will be stolen.
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the images throughout my catalog were deliberately posted as very low res 72DPI images with a majority of them watermarked and only 500pixels in width - is there any kind of “no right click” code that could be incorporated some way? Thank you
There is no such script but there is a way to achieve something similar.
Replace the image with a transparent image the same size and then substitute the original image into the background. Then anyone right clicking to copy the image will just get the transparent one rather than the image they think they are copying. If they don’t realise before they leave the site they may not bother to come back.
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By the way, there’s no difference between 72dpi and 10000dpi for photos on the web. So don’t bother spending any energy setting them all to 72…
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there is if someone copies them. A 72dpi image is only suited to use on the web. The same sized image on the screen at 300dpi would in many cases give an acceptable print - 1200dpi certainly would.
The web uses pixels per inch instead of dots per inch so a 200x100 pixel image at 144 ppi and the same image at 400x200 pixels would effectively be 72 ppi As you make the display size of the image bigger or smaller you change the ppi.
Are you aware of the Tineye browser Addon?
http://www.tineye.com/search/63578cd5af12e6978183b4818c4807fe11ef3011/?pluginver=chrome-1.1.4
Edit:
I believe there are a few other reverse image lookups that do the same job,
Even if you found a mythical means of preventing download totally (which doesn’t exist) the user could still take a screen shot. 
So the only options are:
- don’t post the image
- post just a part of it
- post it at very poor resolution so that it’s not even good on screen
- watermark it heavily enough that it’s too much trouble to edit out the watermarks.
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Maybe it’s time to put (some?) images behind a premium membership wall?
I guess some might feel more entitled to use them if they had to pay some to see them, but you would at least get some compensation as long as the demand is there.
Unfortunately, taking legal action may be what you need to do, but chances are that as satisfying as that might be it would cost more than it’s worth from a financial view.
As it is a newspaper it probably is worth pursuing it. Rather than their ending up having to pay all your court costs they may offer to settle out of court.
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[quote]there is if someone copies them. A 72dpi image is only suited to use
on the web. The same sized image on the screen at 300dpi would in many
cases give an acceptable print - 1200dpi certainly would.
The web uses pixels per inch instead of dots per inch so a 200x100
pixel image at 144 ppi and the same image at 400x200 pixels would
effectively be 72 ppi As you make the display size of the image bigger
or smaller you change the ppi.[/quote]
He’s presenting an image file with 500px in it. Whether his metatada says “72dpi” or “300dpi” will only affect the size of the print (in the first case about 7 inches across, in the second case about an inch and a half). In both cases there are only 500 pixels to print, ie a pretty low quality image. And in either case the person who stole the image could change the setting from 72dpi to 300dpi if he thought it would somehow create a better image.
As you’ve stated, if you put in more pixels in the image, then it gets better. Yes of course.
+1 to this…
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