Image security protection

[salaam]

I don't know if anyone has tried this but I attempted to cover my images with flash after realising that you can make transparent swf files.
It goes some way into protecting those beloved copyright images.
http://www.darulweb.co.uk/designs.htm
Maybe it's the wrong forum as It was all made in XX5?

Anas

[bcire68]

Hi Anas,

Can you explain that a little more please?

When you cover an image with a transparent SWF, and the user tries to copy the image, do they get the transparent SWF instead? If so that is cool.

Also, what is contained in your SWF file? A bit of text (i.e. copyright info) or is it just a blank SWF file?

Thanks for the info.

Eric

[steve.ledger]

You can do the same with a transparent PNG with text links on top.

But it still doesn't prevent screen shots or downloading of your image via Xtreme 5 / Web Designer:

File>>Import graphics from web >> http://www.darulweb.co.uk/designs.htm




There are other image downloaders can rip graphics from URLs too.

[salaam]

Can you explain that a little more please?
When you cover an image with a transparent SWF, and the user tries to copy the image, do they get the transparent SWF instead? If so that is cool.
Also, what is contained in your SWF file? A bit of text (i.e. copyright info) or is it just a blank SWF file?

Hi Eric, the flash file contains a black pixel in the top left-hand corner and yes you only get the swf rather than the image. A transparent bitmap would be an easier option, thanks Steve.
I didn't know that XWD or XX could download images although I did know that free software is widely available to do this.
I also had an idea of punching holes in images and then filling them up with transparent bitmaps of flash files. This would out-fox downloader software but not the old fashioned screen dump.

[BobInce]

It goes some way into protecting those beloved copyright images.

You are completely wasting your time. There are a dozen ways to save images from a web browser that you can do nothing to prevent. The more you do to try to ‘protect’ content, the more you pointlessly risk usability and accessibility problems.

The only way to stop people using images is to give them images they won't want to use, by means of watermarking, JPEG quality loss, small size or cropping.

[covoxer]

"Punching holes" is a good idea to protect against image downloading by any means. So the only thing left is to protect against screen grabbers.
If you don't want to put permanent watermarks as they may hide some of the graphics e.t.c., you can simply put an animated GIF with the watermarks flying all over the protected graphics. This way all screen shots will contain watermark thus being useless, and all downloaded images are mostly useless too.
So it takes at least 3 elements per image:
1. The image with punched holes.
2. The PNG of the holes on top of it.
3. The animated GIF with flying watermarks on top of them all.

It also may look much better to use Flash instead of GIF as it would allow you to make watermarks semitransparent. But, user can disable flash in the browser and then easily screen grab the image. Disabling GIF on the other hand will disable all other images so there's no trivial way to work this around.

[kinetica]

Ingenious anti-theft measure. The only criticism I have of it is that it is very, very ugly. If you only have one or two images to protect you could create a faded, anti-aliased anigif for each one, but if you have a gallery of images this becomes impractical so you end up using a generic ugly anigif.

And of course there's nothing to stop a determined thief taking 2 or 3 screengrabs and then laying them on top of each other and removing the anigif overlays.

I'm with BobInce. The only way to stop the theft of your images is:

• to make your images such crap quality they're not worth stealing
• to not display your images at all

If there was truly a way of being able to prevent the theft of online images people like Corbis and Getty would be using it. But they too realise it's impossible so instead they use image recognition software bots to trawl the web and bombard the owner of websites using their images without authorisation with cease and desist orders plus invoices for the period of time the image has been on the owner's site. They use incredibly heavy-handed bully-boy tactics which, in many cases, work. Clearly nobody on here has that kind of muscle.

[salaam]

You are completely wasting your time.

My original concern was not to protect my own art-work but rather to protect my laboured work. I was inspired by a problem I had while creating a site for a client who wanted to sell books. He instructed me to copy and paste the book images from his suppliers web site but they had played with the images so that what you saw was not what you got so I gave up and told my client to get me the images himself.
My target was also to prevent the ordinary majority from using my work. Such people generally do not have such tools as XX nor the time and patience to mess around with images.

It also may look much better to use Flash instead of GIF as it would allow you to make watermarks semitransparent. But, user can disable flash in the browser and then easily screen grab the image. Disabling GIF on the other hand will disable all other images so there's no trivial way to work this around.

But if you also had the precious images displayed as flash then this wouldn't be a problem. Nor would it be a problem if the 'punched holes' were filled in with flash images.
The main thing is that as I said:

'It goes some way into protecting those beloved copyright images'

Also I think that such protective tasks would be very very difficult to achieve in any other software as XX is both a graphics package as well as a web design package.

[covoxer]

But if you also had the precious images displayed as flash then this wouldn't be a problem. Nor would it be a problem if the 'punched holes' were filled in with flash images.

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but Alt+PrnScr does work well with flash, doesn't it?
The step that I suggested was to complicate screen grabbing approach.

To all skeptics - it's true that there's no way to protect published content. But as far as I understand, we are talking about complicating process of it's retrieval.

[salaam]

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but Alt+PrnScr does work well with flash, doesn't it? The step that I suggested was to complicate screen grabbing approach.

Yes but the screen grab would still have your flash watermark which you can't switch off as the main image is also in flash.