you know how someone Right-Click "save's as" ?

How do you stop them from doing it? and How do you create a custom message within the pop-up box that shows up?

make it into flash media ...

There is no 100% effective method to protect images. Any method you use can be bypassed with a simple screen capture app. An alternative is to water-mark all your images so the thief is less likely to bother.

But...to answer your question...
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/noright.htm

The link above is helpful but any thief could just disable Javascript. Just watermark them would be my idea.

Watermark them or make a flash movie. The problem with flash is that if you are trying to get the content listed in a search engine, that will not happen with flash.

Disabling the right-click is simply annoying, as well as being worthless.

Truth is theres no good way to do it, because if someone wants an image from a website that has right-click disabled, they can always take a screenshot of the image, put it into paint, crop it, and save it.

Yeh, pointless disableing it because if someone was to nick and image then all they do to is go to View >> Page source and look up to where your images are located. Pointless in my eyes.

If it can be viewed on the browser, it can be saved.

I once found a very professional looking and obviously creative application designed to hide HTML code and stop images from being stolen. I laughed when it took me exactly 30 seconds to figure out a way to view all of the source as well as take all of the images from the example they gave.

I love FF. Tools -> Page Info -> Media. Find image then Save As.

Originally Posted by jordanm

Truth is theres no good way to do it, because if someone wants an image from a website that has right-click disabled, they can always take a screenshot of the image, put it into paint, crop it, and save it.

yeah, that's what I was thinkin'.

I wanted to protect the images I was going to use on my shopping cart site.

I then wanted a message to pop-up when someone tries to save the image, and the box will say something like: "hey, you can't do that! That's shoplifting!"

Guess that idea is pointless though, lol

Originally Posted by Lashtal

you know how someone Right-Click "save's as" ?

If you don't mind hiding it from Google Images, display a transparent gif at the right size, with the real thing as a background image.

Worth mentioning: Don't put them in an images directory named something obvious like image1.jpg, image2.jpg etc. Watermarking is a good idea, but also scatter them around in various directories. You could do something like a db table that tells you where the images are and cache the location for 24 hours or something so you don't do a db call every time the page is loaded.

I don't know much about JavaScript, but I bet preloading images client side might be a bad idea if you are worried about images being stolen. There are probably some work arounds on that if you are cleaver though.

If you are really paranoid, you could dynamically rename the images every ??? time and load a cross reference in a db table.

Kinda fun stuff to think about, but I'd just watermark them and call it a day. There are also bots that can search for your watermarked images. I don't know anything more than that though.

I think the best way is a water mark but why is it important that you prevent people from copying your images?

Whenever I steal images, if I can't right-click to save them, I put thin paper over my screen and trace the image.

Some good ideas for preventing image theft in this thread that I will have to try out. I've been meaning to experiment with having a css rollover watermark for some time so will post the results a little later today

But can you stop the tracing method? I have a pad of paper at the ready!

You can disable right click to prevent people from saving images but when they disable javascript they can right click easily.
You can also put pictures as the background of tables but people can view the source and find out the picture url and save it.
You can put pictures in flash but even after that there are smart people who can save flash and it's images.

So there are no perfect ways that I know of which can prevent anyone from taking images.

There is also a keyboard shortcut for right click that works even if right click is disabled.

Also, if you have an images folder, make sure you have an empty index.html file there so someone can't get a listing of all your images. Depending on how the server is configured, you may also need an htaccess file in that directory to make the index.html work.