Watermarking Images

Part 1 : Why Other Methods Don't Work

The first thing many people think of when they decide that they want to protect the images that they have uploaded to the web is to apply a "No Right Click" script. The only thing that applying such a script to a page does is to interfere with legitimate visitors use of their web browser and encourage some people who think that they are clever (but aren't) to actually steal your images. This is because a no right click script provides no protection to images whatsoever. There are too many other ways to take images without right clicking and also you can easily disable the script, temporarily disable Javascript, or just turn Javascript off in the browser completely in order to access the context (right click) menu.

More effective than using no right click is to place the image behind another transparent image so that anyone right clicking will copy the transparent image instead. This method is more effective because the person may not realise for some time that they have the wrong image but once they do it is easy for them to return to your site and take the right image.

The problem is that there are too many ways that your images can be stolen and it is impossible to block most of these methods. The simplest way that they can get your images is to Save your page using the appropriate option in the File menu of their browser. There is no way to disable this in most browsers and even where you could there is little point sincethey already have copies of all of the images on the page in their browser cache that were downloaded to their computer in order for them to view your web page in the first place. They can easily copy them from there even if you could block every other method of accessing them.

So what can we do to protect images if these methods don't work? The answer is Watermarking.

Part 2 : Why Watermarking Works

A watermark is a semi-transparent image that overlays the image itself. Unlike the other types of image protection that we have discussed, the watermark is actually embedded into the image itself.

A watermark in the image doesn't stop someone from taking your images. It is impossible to do that. However if they do steal watermarked images then those images are still watermarked. The watermark is extremely easy to insert into an image but extremely difficult to remove without significantly damaging the part of the image overlaid by the watermark.

Anyone who steals your images will therefore either have to use them with the watermark still in place or will have to put almost as much effort into removing the watermark as would have been required to draw the image in the first place - something that they are unlikely to do.

Provided that you place the watermark so that it covers a significant portion of the image then anyone taking the image is unlikely to have the ability to remove it.

The watermark can actually be just about anything. It might contain your special logo and some text. The text can identify that the image is copyright, it might also identify who the image belongs to.

One text watermark that you could use is the address of your web site where the images appear. This makes it obvious to anyone who views the images anywhere else that they have been copied from your site. The most that the person who stole the images could do would be to post some sort of notice on their page stating that they have your permission to display the images (even though they don't really). Of course these images are now working FOR YOU because anyone who sees the stolen images now knows where to find your site. The thief is providing you with free advertising.

Of course you will still want to get the thief's site shut down once you find out about it. Having a watermark in the image will make this easier too since the images are readily identifiable as yours so the thief can't claim that they own the images.

So how do you apply a watermark to your images? Well you do that in your graphics program by editing the images themselves. How you do it depends on which graphics program that you have.