When you’ve spent time and money creating product photos for your small business ecommerce Web site, the last thing you want is someone else helping themselves to your content. Not only is it annoying when they steal your property but -- in cases where other businesses link to images on your site -- your Web server is working to serve up content to your customers and to theirs.
One protection option: Add a copyright symbol and text to your image, and then blend it in so it's visible but not overly distracting.
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While there is no guaranteed way to stop people from stealing your images, there are ways you can discourage them from doing so. Let's look at some of your options.
Watermark Your ImagesAdding a visible watermark is one of the most popular to protect your images and make them either less attractive or more difficult to steal or to link to. Typically this watermark will be your site name, logo and often a copyright symbol. When you embed this in your photo, you make it unattractive for someone to take or link to the image because it's marked clearly with your business name and not theirs.
If you have a small number of photos you can watermark your images yourself in any graphics program. In Photoshop, for example, open the photo and click the Type tool. Select a good sized, easy-to-read, plain font and type your copyright details. To get the copyright symbol, hold the Alt key you type 0169 on the keyboard number pad. If you choose to add your company logo, copy and paste it into a new layer in the image.
Blend the copyright text into the image so that it’s visible but not unappealing. Reduce the opacity of the text layer so the text blends into the image underneath. To ensure that you can see the text over images with a background color that's similar to the type, add a contrasting color drop shadow to the text.
Other blending options you can use include applying a blend mode to the text layer such as overlay, or you can apply a bevel and emboss effect to the text.
When you are done, save the copyrighted image in a different location to the original file so you don't lose your original. This is important because, when you save an image as a JPG image for the Web, the layers are flattened so you will not be able to remove the copyright details from the image if you overwrite the original.
Figure 1
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Online Watermarking Tools
Other methods of adding copyright details to your image include Web services such as WaterMarkTool, which is free for images up to 200 kb in size. In addition, PicMarkr offers a free option as well as a for-fee Windows download tool that you can use.
Of course, watermarking is only one way you can protect your images and discourage theft. Other options include "shrink-wrapping" your image where, instead of displaying the image on your Web site you code it to display as a background image for a single cell HTML table and you place a small transparent image stretched to fit inside the table cell itself.
SignMyImage combines a hidden watermark and a Web spider that seeks out sites using your images.
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If someone right-clicks the image to save it all they will save is the transparent image. This solution requires a small amount of coding, which is not difficult, and a single transparent image. The code in Figure 1 is a sample of the type of code you can use.
You can also disable your visitor's browser's right-click menu but I don't recommend that because there are other options on the right-click menu that many users might wish to use. These include bookmarking the page and sending the link to someone else. If you disable the right-click menu you may frustrate visitors who have no intention of stealing your pictures.
It’s also possible to protect your images at a server level using ASP, PHP or Flash scripts. If you use these you will need to have some scripting expertise or to pay someone to do it for you. Some scripting solutions will add watermarks to your photos on the fly as your visitors download the images.
Another option is a service like SignMyImage. This relatively inexpensive service not only embeds an invisible copyright symbol into the pixels in your image, but you can also sign up to receive reports from the spider service that tells you where your images are being used.
Rather than stealing your photos and serving them up from their Web sites, some people simply link to your images. In this situation your server is serving up images to someone else's visitors. You can add code to your server that ensures that images are delivered only to sites you specify and not any others. Again some skill is required to implement this solution, but it can help you protect your bandwidth and discourage others from using your images.
If your images are valuable, which is the case for many sites, you'll want to take steps to protect your property. Remember, however that most of these solutions can only discourage theft and a really dedicated person can generally find a way around most of them.
Helen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. You can learn more about her at her Web site, HelenBradley.com
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