Stop people right clicking images

[Seglespaan]

Hi,

 

I want to stop people being able to right click and save an image, this will be loaded using php into an image holder thus I'm not sure if using css or JS is possible,

 

Does anyone have any way to stop people being able to do this?

 

Cheers

 

[BenInBlack]

One trick is to place the real image a background=image.jpg attribute of <td> tag and then creating a transparent image to display in the td area

 

so <td background="real_image.jpg"><img src="tranparent_image.gif" border="0"></td>

 

then when they right click they are just saving the tranparent_image.gif ;-)

[.josh]

...which can still be worked around quite easily.  afaik there's no way to do that, that can't be easily circumvented.  Hence watermarking.

[Seglespaan]

I take it this can be changed to

 

<td background=<?php> echo row_realimages; ?>><img src="tranparent_image.gif" border="0"></td>

[Seglespaan]

But then in most cases the general public either won't have the know how or won't be bother to circumvent,

 

[Psycho]

What he (Crayon Violent) said. There is absolutely, positively no way to prevent someone from "stealing" your images. Any image a user sees in their browser has already been downloaded to their machine. It's just sitting in their cache waiting for the user to find it.

 

Every method to prevent this has a fairly simple workaround. And, when all else fails, the user can simply press the "Print Screen" key and capture a screenshot.

 

The best you can do is to use watermarking to prevent others from reusing your photos as trying to pass them off as their own. Just be sure to use watermarking correctly. Don't put it around the edges where it can be easily cropped. You need to ensure it is in the subject of the image and strike a balance between making the watermaking impossible (or very hard) to erradicate and not taking away from the subject of the photo.

[chronister]

This would be a javascript item to prevent right click, however the best thing to do is what BenInBlack suggested.

 

But keep in mind, if a person is determined to get that image, they will.

 

I have done this before myself. It took a while to dig through the code and get the real image properties, but I accomplished it. It was a couple years ago and it was the first time I saw the transparent image trick. So for fun I wanted to see if it was a real good deterrent. I will say that the average user with little to no knowledge of web development would have a hard time doing it.

 

Don't do the right click thing as that just pisses users off. Typically I have firefox set to not allow disabling or replacing of the context menu. I hate sites that do that and will steal images just because they tried to stop me with weak JS tricks.

 

Nate

[.josh]

I'd also like to point out that there are lots of browser addons (for FF anyways) that will do all the hard work for you and give you a nice list of every single image on the page, no matter how it's displayed, and from there, a simple rightclick > save as is possible. 

 

Or just screen capturing as someone else mentioned.  People trying to steal your image may not have "web dev" experience, but you can bet they probably have some photoshop type experience, at least enough to use the screen capturing utilities. 

 

Point is, no, it will not deter the "average joe."