Prevent saving images

Hello all,

I've seen on some sites where one is unable to save the images from that site. Is there a property or something that I would use where I can prevent users from saving images from my site?

I'm using VS 2008 and asp.net 3.5

Thanks,

Strick

Hey,

Can you provide a link to a site where you have seen this?

In all likelihood, they have done something on the client side to make it harder to save the image, but it certainly would't be impossible. The only sure fire way to protect your images, would be to put some more of copyright notice on the image, i.e. a watermark. At the end of the day, if you can see it in the browser, you can grab it.

Gary

Hi,

Thanks for your response. Actually I don't know of any off hand. But there were times I was surfing and came across sites in which I couldn't save images off the site.

Strick

Hey,

If you find one, post a link to it, and we can take a look at how they have implemented it, however, as I have mentioned, there is always normally a way around this, hence the use of watermarks, or low resolution versions of the images.

What type of images are you trying to protect?

Gary

I'm developing an site for a non-profit organization I'm apart of.

Stuff like our logos and trademarks. I'd also want to protect images of children we post when doing events from our mentorship program.

Thanks,

Strick

Hey,

Have you considered making it a members only site? i.e. implement a login so that only the people that you want to see the images can?

Logos would be protected under copyright:

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/pr...logo_copyright

Gary

Hi,

Well the images of children would be from service events and projects we do so we'd want everyone to see those. Good point on the logo thing.

I didn't mention one thing since you have a valid point. Our non profit organization is a chapter of a national organization. We have a guy in our chapter that does nice images of art which contains our logo, shield, trademark, etc. We don't want another chapter taking these images and putting them on their chapter site as their own. Since they are in the same org, they'd be protected under copywrite law from taking our images..

Strick

Hey,

The bottom line, as I understand it, is that if you are going to make the images public, i.e. visible on your site, then there is not sure fire way to prevent people from taking the image. Methods that try to do this on the client, i.e. preventing the right click in the browser, etc, can all be easily circumvented.

Gary

Hi, Thanks for your advice.

I think I'm going to look into the disable browser click way to atleast make it a little harder for ppl to get them. Then I'll also explore other methods as well. It sounds like it's like web security (ie a determined hacker will figure out a way to circumvent things) so maybe my best options is to just make it as difficult as possible to get them.

Thanks,

Strick

There's no foolproof way to do this, whatever you do can be bypassed. The moment the image is sent to the user's browser, it's on their machine and they can even choose to raid their temporary files folder. They could even take a screenshot and save that, so on and so forth.

You may have seen this on flickr. Look at this example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pink_farasha/4343280482/

Right clicking on the image doesn't let you "view image" or "save image". What they've done is they've created a div on the page and set the background image of the div to be the actual photo that you're seeing there. So if you then disable JS, and right click view image, you get a spaceball.gif. So that's a DIV, with a spaceball.gif in it as an <img> and the actual image as a background. The DIV has an ID of #photoImgDiv434328048 which, in the CSS, points to the actual image.

There are other options like disabling right click, as you said, but it's up to you how far you choose to go.