First at all I should tell you that I already checked this forum and find few solutions how to protect your JPEG images, but none of those helped me.

I am runing pretty huge photograph community with over 7000 photos.

The main problem is how to protect them?

I am not talking about "no right click" scripts. On www.photopoints.com I saw pretty good way how to protect images.

Does anyone have useful solution for me?

PS: I know that it's impossible to secure images 100%, but at least 90% would do just fine 😉

Link to my gallery:
http://www.slo-foto.net/modules.php?name=Galerija&l=english

    I can't see what copy protection that website uses, I saved out an image and it would be perfectly usable. It it were me I would use GD to put a watermark on all images if the user wasn't allowed to use them (this would also involve making the images directory inaccessible by HTTP request).

      First of all, there is no protection.

      The only thing you can do, serving pix by php from outsode of your public_html. This will stop perfectly leeching or even hotlinking.

      You may also consider to use sitewise watermarking too...there are several post about this here on this forum.

      Once i saw an interesting method on a sex site, where they using agressive anti-caching methods so even the browser not store in the cache anything. Even this can be bypassed...

        Right now there isn't any protection (only httaccess leeching).

        That's why I realy need your help.

        Watermark is not suitable for my site, becouse it ruins photo.

          No i meant add the watermark 'on the fly'. If a user is allowed to use the image, simply don't add the watermark.

            Originally posted by Shrike
            No i meant add the watermark 'on the fly'. If a user is allowed to use the image, simply don't add the watermark.

            Sorry I didn't understand you at first place. That would save the problem for a while, but as I said, would reather see some kind of PHP coding for images.

              You may try to load the image as background of a table and put watermark or just a transparent pix in the table and the user will see the pix but Save as will not work, since they will save transparent pix and serving both from outside of public_html
              make for the user images called as display.php

              But if anything appears on the screen, you not able to protect 🙂

                What about some kind of streaming mod?

                Can anyone tells me if there is any mode that does streaming for images?

                  Originally posted by George_hu
                  You may try to load the image as background of a table and put watermark or just a transparent pix in the table and the user will see the pix but Save as will not work, since they will save transparent pix and serving both from outside of public_html
                  make for the user images called as display.php

                  But if anything appears on the screen, you not able to protect 🙂

                  That doesn't work with Firefox 🙁

                    Originally posted by Lucifix
                    That doesn't work with Firefox 🙁

                    sure it does. firefox supports background images. you must be doing something wrong.

                    personally what i would do, if watermarking isnt an option, and its ok for the few % of people who are slick enough to get around it, would be something like this

                    
<div style="background: url(image.php?id=43) no-repeat;"><img src="clear.gif" width="foo" height="foo"></div>

                    the width and height of clear.gif would be dynamically generated depending on the size of the image.

                    you could even make the images id expire after being used once. basically everytime you generate an html page you would create an entry in a database that serves as an alias for a specific image. once image.php outputs an image, it would remove that id from the database. oh and of course send no cache headers.

                    this would work decent against most users i would think. but you could get around it by making your browser NOT display images, then request the page, look at the html to get the image id, and then just goto the url and save the image. very few users would think of doing that though. it also wouldnt stop crawlers from crawling your site and stealing images, but you know you cant 100% stop theft . i think my suggestion of using an alias id for the image that expires after being used once, would satisfy the 90% figure you asked for.

                    another thing you may consider, which is kind of like watermarking, would be to cut the images up into a few slices, but then make it display like it were a whole image by using an html table. that would make it a royal pain for anyone to steal your images because they would need to reconstruct them all. you could combine slicing the images with the method i suggested above(using a clear gif in front to prevent right clicking and then using random alias image ids). i think that would make deter all but the most persitant people.

                    another option that seems simple and would be effective is to embed all images in flash.

                      Yeah... you can never protect a picture that is displayed in a browser 100% without a watermark because if a user really wanted a picture they could take a screenshot of it.

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