Tutorial: Protect your web photos.

OTHER APPROACHES: There is little that will protect your web images from technically savvy users. That said, there are a handful of techniques different photographers use to discourage casual theft. Experiment with the following images to see how hard or easy each approach is to circumvent.

Watermarking. Always add your copyright information directly to the photo itself. People can download your photo, but if your copyright information obscures part of the image, it is less useful to them.
Roll-Over Image. One easy technique we've seen is adding a simple rollover to every image. When a reader moves their mouse over a particular photo, the image turns into a more blatant copyright notice.
Masking Image. That's what this tutorial demonstrates. Hide your copyrighted image underneath a transparent .gif or .png file.
Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows you to create image links based on an external style sheet. This does not prevent someone from reading your source code and getting the link to the real image. However, it does make them have to work for it. Also refer to Tip #58: The Zen of CSS Web Design.
Embed Photos with Flash. An increasingly common method to discourage theft of portfolio images is embedding all photos in Flash-based elements. This take a bit more work, but protects the raw image files better than the other techniques described here.
HTML Encryption. This last approach is a bit more drastic. There are software packages available that will re-write your HTML code into a format that is very hard to decipher, even for skilled HTML users. To the right is a link of our sample page as encrypted by a product availble at Aevita.com (Note: Aevita Encrypt is a Windows-only software.)		VIEW DEMO PAGE

Additional Resources: While completing this tutorial we've uncovered some additional articles that discuss this topic. Below are links to some of the better ones:

Copyright - Image Protection by Lucid Images Wildlife Photography
Locking Down Your Content on DevelopingWebs.net
Protecting Your Online Images from Hostile Invasions by Michael Carr
Protecting Your Images on the Web by Vic Ferri

Thanks for wading through this little write-up. Any comments? Got another good technique? We are always looking for new way to help our clients protect their images. Please email them to tips@creativetechs.com.

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