How to protect photos from being printed

[kutay]

I do not my objects (photos, pictures etc.) to be saved and printed by the others when they enter my webpage. Is there any way in XWD to disable for the photos to be saved and then printed by the visitors? If the answer is no, is it possible to stick a transparent company name on each photo?

[zaphodeist]

I don't think there's any way of doing that in any program. What you can do is add some text or a logo, apply the transparency tool, group and export.

[steve.ledger]

It is not possible - ever.
Once an image is viewable on screen, anyone can take a screen shot and print it.
You can overlay some text with transparency and group it to create a watermarked version, or simply don't use photos of good enough quality to make it worthwhile for anyone to bother printing.

Please see this related thread:
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?p=315723

There have also been other threads this year which discuss the topic, please try a forum search.


Edit: John got in while I was fluffing around...

[philt]

Is there any way in XWD to disable for the photos to be saved and then printed by the visitors?

It seems the answer is no. But I wonder. On the Flickr site you can find many images that are protected: with these images, if you select the 'save image as...' option, you end up downloading a useless little file called spaceball.gif. Somehow Flickr hijacks your request and substitutes this small gif. I don't know how it's done though. Maybe someone else here can comment?

[zaphodeist]

Still a waste of time Phil: as Steve says anyone can take a screenshot and people elsewhere on here have said about retrievng the image from the cache anyway

[ckh]

It looks like what Flickr is doing is positioning the spaceball.gif over top of the real image. The spaceball.gif is 1X1 pixel and probably transparent but they resize it dynamically to the same dimensions of the photo being displayed.

Since the spaceball.gif is sitting on top of the real picture, you just can't see it, when you right-click on the image, you are right-clicking on it instead of the image you are looking at.

However, the image underneath is still easily downloadable.

[kutay]

May I ask how I can get watermarked version of the photos? Let's say, I have 10 photos on the first page and 10 photos on the second. What should I do to overlay a text on each photo and export them?
Thank you...

[Soquili]

For an image to be viewable on screen it must be present on your hard drive and loaded into video memory. The Temporary Internet files folders contains every image you have viewed online for the period of time set in internet options to maintain history.

As others have already said use low quality or watermarked images if you are concerned about them being used by someone other than you. Even watermarks can be cleaned up using Photoshop or other bitmap editor.

So if you post images online you cannot be sure they are not being used without your consent.

[Soquili]

Open Xtreme and click the Help menu. Click on Movies then scroll down to the Photos section and click on the Photo Watermark.

The video explains how to put a watermark on you images.

[kutay]

I use Xara Web Designer.