While at an art festival I spoke with many artists who not only had a booth at the show, but also a website. These artists often asked the same question. “How do I stop people from stealing the images off my website?”

Since their images are their livelihood, and it’s so easy for a visitor to the site to steel an image, it’s only a matter of time before that thief prints the image out with their home printer (probably a photo printer these days). Worse still are the professional thieves who take that image straight to a professional printer and print thousands *on canvas*.

To understand image thieves, imagine leaving valuables in an unlocked car. Let’s say there’s a latest-greatest cellphone sitting on the passenger seat of a car with the window rolled down. Can you honestly expect that phone to be there when you return?

I remember an old saying I heard once that goes: “Locks keep honest people honest.” You need to be aware of the fact that your images are valuable, then you need be wise enough to lock your doors. However if you ask any car alarm company, they will tell you that there is no such thing as “anti-theft” systems, only “theft deterrent” systems. Even cars with car alarms get broken into. So realize that you can’t stop the thief, but you can make the next car look more tempting than your own.

Let’s start at the beginning. How to steal an image off a webpage and some common deterrents.

1. Right-click on an image, select “save as”. The thief will have your image in seconds. Many people attempt to “disable right-click” to combat this by either making it do nothing, or by making it pop-up a message that notes the copyright holder’s information. This has mixed results. Not all browsers are the same, I recently saw a site that used the pop-up method which worked in Internet Explorer, but not in FireFox.
2. Can’t right-click? No problem. Go to the “file” menu and “save as” on the whole page. Be sure to select the “complete” file type. Now they have all the images in about 15 seconds, even if right-click is disabled. I’ve seen a website attempt to combat this by breaking their images up into smaller images. So instead of finding one big image, the thief will find 20 or so individual tiles that make up the image. Another attempt to combat this is to put the image in a Flash file, so the user gets the file but it’s not an image file and not as useful.
3. right-click and file menu don’t work? No problem, just hit the Print Screen key (PrtSc, usually above the Home key). Now open any paint program, like MS Paint. “Paste” by either hitting <ctrl>+v or using one of the menus in the menu bar. Now just crop the image and “save as”. This time they have the image in about 30 seconds (if their good at it). The next form of theft deterrent is adding a visible watermark to the image such as translucent text across the image that spells out the name of the site.
4. Now when a thief steals an image they need to spent time manually removing the watermark. This *is* possible, but it takes time. The thief will probably need to spend 5 minutes to an hour depending one how well the watermark was placed. Even if they do decide to put in that time, will they be willing to do it for every image they wanted to steal? Will they invest a whole day stealing 10 of your images, or will they move on to the next site and easily steal 100 in an hour?

Again, I stress that there is no such things as “anti-theft”, only “deterrent”. –but now that you can see that even watermarked images can be stolen, consider this: Why bother locking out right-click or breaking up your images into tiles or putting them in a flash file? Why not just watermark them and then *encourage* people to right-click and save as?

This may sound counter intuitive, but if your images have your website’s name on them, it turns into free advertising. Suddenly you want people to take your work and forward it to all their friends because it will lead more people back to your site. So if you’re watermarking your images, don’t disable right-click or any of that other stuff since you’ve turned your weakness into a strength. You’ve turned your image into a digital business card.

What’s great about this is that I’ve seen artists get their image stolen and their watermark removed so someone can pass it off as their own. Then everyday people like you and me will see the stolen image and say “wait a minute, I know that picture, one of my friends forwarded me that picture.” Before long someone will say “hey, that’s stolen! I’d better inform the original artist right away!” That’s right, people start helping you track down thieves.

Finally, many sites take this whole watermarking business a step further and make images that are meant to be saved to the visitors computer. If you look at a website that has beautiful images and a separate section for “free desktop wallpaper,” you’ll see what I mean. A smart individual will make desktop wallpaper out of one of there best images and make sure it cleverly spouts the name of their website in such a way that it’s no longer a watermark on top of the image, it’s a watermark that’s baked right into the image –and no one even questions it.

If you’d like help adding watermarks to all your images, or if you’d like to implement one of the other deterrents mentioned above, please feel free to contact me and I can help you out.

I hope that was helpful,
~Danny

Got a website question? Email it to Danny.

Tags: image thieft, watermarks

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.