Redirecting Print

[TheGoldenShogun]

Now I can get this to work on IE just fine, but like with most things, Netscape gives me problems. I'm trying to make it so that if people try to print an image on our website just by going to file -> Print it prints off a different page that alerts them they cannot print. And heres the snippet I found for that.

<link rel='alternate' media='print' href='../noprint.html'>

Under Internet Explorer it works wonders. However, if the user just logs onto Netscape, it doesn't recognize it and they can just print away. Now being a website that sells images online you can see how this hurts my company. Anybody know another way to get this to work on netscape?

[CiberTHuG]

Wow... I'm kind of suprised this doesn't work in Netscape and does work in IE. The reason is, IE doesn't support @media=projection, and Mozilla supports alternate stylesheets.

I guess it is possible that IE does support @media=print and that Netscape supports alternate stylesheets, but only for screen.

'Course, it doesn't matter. If I can get it on my screen, I can print it. You just make me use a couple extra keystrokes.

Perhaps you should look at an embedded Java applet that will allow them to preview the images, but that doesn't support printing. 'Course, they can just do a screen capture, and you have to rely on third-party Java support for IE.

[TheGoldenShogun]

Yeah, thats what I was thinking too but I found this link about it...

http://www.insidedhtml.com/tips/styles/ts41/page1.asp

It says that it may be supported by Netscape 6 (I tried it and its not). I was thinking along the lines of an applet but they can be fairly slow and the site is already slow enough for 56k modems. Does anybody know any PHP or ASP that could disable the images from being printed.

[progressive]

I don't think there is any sure fire way of stopping this as if they
want to print your image a determined person will find away.

Why don't you put a watermark in your images and only make un-watermarked hi-res images available to paying customers !

[TheGoldenShogun]

Yeah, thats the system we have in place now. We have thumbnails, then 400x400 images with watermarks but whats happenin is these kids are printing off their pictures of the prom and just cutting them for scrapbooks. But I guess you can't defend against everything.

[progressive]

Fraid not, unless you make them pay to use the service before they can see the images - can't see that taking off though !

What's the site ?

[TheGoldenShogun]

sorry bout that progressive, sent the message to just you.

[progressive]

I've got a possible solution but it is not without flawless.

I've looked at your demo and you display thumbnails then the user clicks a thumbbnail and the big image is displayed to the right.

Why don't you display the big images when a user roles over the thumbnail and when they role out a blank is displayed. This way when they go for the print button (or file/print) no big images are displayed. did you follow that ?

next hide the image URL's away in a hidden frame or JS file !
You could even write some kind of encryption tool to make the URL's unreadable without being decrypted first by a javascript function !

What do you think ?

[progressive]

It wont stop that helpful little button on your keyboard though "Prt Sc" you mjay be able to do an onKeypress command to stop this though *shrugs*

[TheGoldenShogun]

I see what you're saying but I need that image to enlarge. Because once it enlarges, I take that image and let the user email it, order it, etc. But what do you mean by putting the URLs in an external javascript file? is that to prevent them from mapping right to it?

[progressive]

you can use javascript to load an image as if you are doing an
image swap. Do this from a JS file thus hiding the URL of the
image from the user. Unless they are a web developer then
they'll easily find it....I think the thing to do is just make it as
difficult as possible for the user this will deter most free loaders

What about displaying the large image in a layer next to the thumbnail and making it visible onmousover of the thumbnail with the options to buy etc underneath the image this way the user can

1) mouseover thumbnail
2) large image pops up
3) user mouses over the large image and selects buy etc from just below the image
4) if user mouses out of the thumbnail or the large image then the large image dissapears.

could get a bit messy that though......