Prevent Copyrighting???

[gk20]

I want to upload pictures/images to my site but I ALSO want to prevent other people from copying them??

How is this possible? That is, that people won't be able to copy any images from my site??
Any help please?

[AndyB]

Short answers.

If it's on the internet, it can be copied and you can't prevent it.

If you own the copyright, then you own the copyright and apart from defined 'fair use' anyone who uses the material without your consent is in violation of your copyright.  That will provide moral satisfaction, but unless you have unlimited funds and very good lawyers that's the very best that's you'll get.

[Guest WarpNacelle]

Here's a decent article that will give you some suggestions on how to protect your images but, as stated above, nothing is foolproof.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/dont-disable-right-click

[ToonMariner]

You can make it as hard as you like but the only real way I see of protecting such imges is to water mark them.  This ruins teh picture of course as if you don't bang the watermark right across the image then others will just crop it off.

Even if you did all the tricks in the book the image will still be cahced on the clint machine - so long as they know where to look then they have it....

[pkSML]

I believe you can get around the browser caching problem with custom HTTP headers.
Note my sig picture you see below for instance. My [url=http://calvarybucyrus.org/server/server.htm]server - my home computer :)[/url] sent your browser the header: [b]Cache-Control: no-cache[/b]. The browser shouldn't save the picture at all.

Note: There's always an exception, so here it is. A program like [url=http://stephen.calvarybucyrus.org/redirect.php?file=WinGet]WinGet[/url] will download the file, regardless of the headers.

[ToonMariner]

u leanr something every day!

I should go learn about headers properly - Iam sure there ismuch more you can do with them that what I do....

[pkSML]

If you want to put that header on your images, you can do it one of two ways.

1. Via the server - have all the images in a certain folder and set the custom header to apply to all requests from that folder. This is the tricky way, as you must change the configuration for your server, if this is even allowed.

2. Via PHP - you can serve images from a php script. This is very simple. (The sig you see below is displayed with a PHP script.)

HTML code:
[code]<img src="image1.php">[/code]

PHP code (image1.php):
[code]<?php
header('Content-type: image/gif'); //MIME type for file
header('Cache-Control: no-cache'); //file not stored in browser cache
$handle = file_get_contents("image.gif"); //file to print
print "$handle";
fclose($handle);
?>[/code]

*Edit: I forgot to add the cache-control header in the PHP code. It's there now.

[Wintergreen]

For everything (even gifs I guess if the person is that motivated) they can always just press print screen and resave the picture

[Daniel0]

I bet whatever you do I would be able to download the image.

The only thing you can do, is to make it more difficult and hope that people will give up.