protecting JPEGs
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- heavyt
what is the best way to keep others from stealing your photos?
i am working on an ecommerce site. there are about 60,000+ photos, and they seems to be getting ripped off all of the time by other companies. i want to make it possible to trace whether a photo is ours or not.
TR1
- jevad0
faint watermark it or something - thats the only way
- xcissor0
are you honestly that torn up over people trying to steal your shit though? watermarks and all that take away from the work. people can take your work no matter what, its just something you have to live with.
- heavyt0
actually, to use the term "Art" regarding these photos is a stretch. they are product photos.
the point is that we are in a competitive business, and the resources that we spend on photos are allocated to help OUR customers.
we really just want to know that the people that are trying to take our business arent using our stuff to do it.
TR1
- Xentic0
you can't do anything about it. I see a lot of these java scripts to prevent people from stealing images... but that's al crap. Everybody can take a screenshot anyway...
- cosmo0
just disable right click, and get some Hotlink protection script. Or something.
- ikbenvanrijn0
yep & the javascript right click only works on PC so...
- cosmo0
oh didn't know that. hmmm...would write a php script to do it. Did write one for protecting URL's a while back.
- ikbenvanrijn0
only with PC IE it works. the javascript. well i have not played with it on the open source ones on PC.
- mikeim0
it may not be practical, but you could place the images as a background in a table. Although anybody who knows a little html can read the code and connect directly to the photo.
- heavyt0
yeah, i dotn think that the right click disable will help much.
i think that we have already admitted that we cant stop people from taking our photos.
we really dotn care if some dude uses them for his ebay auction or whatever.
what we do want , is to know when our direct competitor is using them so that we can take legal actions.TR1
ps. what is the best way to watermark them? any tips?
- ikbenvanrijn0
photoshop.
can make an action with placing a watermark & re-saving them. can batch them up
- heavyt0
is there a technique to it?
is there a watermark plug-in or something?
TR1
- rson0
on PC you can just right "save as background" to save background. Yeah it isalmost in possible to lock your photos on all platforms. Unless, you create them in flash. But, that doesn't seem worth it.
- BZZZP0
just write a .htaccess rule that prevents certain access to the images.
the basic idea is to see what the referring page is, but you can go a step beyond that and say "only if the same user token asked for this page in the last X seconds do we allow access to this image" - by having some sort of lookup (in sql) ... this can be very expensive in terms of server overhead, but it -will- prevent the mechanized looting of your images.
also, making meaningless expiring apparent URLs for your images (think like the expiring links to google's cached pages) would work rather well.
and yeah, any JS based solution is garbage.
- cosmo0
put up a big copyright bullshit, and fuck with them.
- industry730
create yourself a watermark and put that on every image, as well as the URL at the bottom.
you can also use services from DIGIMARC, this secretly will embed a digital code into the image, (using a photoshop plug-in which is already installed) you can then signup for one of their services which crawls the web, much like a search engine and will find pictures with their digital signature attached. and create a report for you to use.
if you find that someone has taken your image and used it against your Site Policy you can send them a letter to cease and desist or you will take legal action.
but in all reality if you are taking lots of product pictures, and putting a well placed (but not to obtrusive) watermark it will keep most people from stealing them.