How you copy protect images for the Internet depends on where and how they will be viewed because displaying images on a website owned by you provides options not available when posting to a shared site like a blog or social media. Likewise, different methods of image protection are needed for viewing on the desktop when compared to online viewing from a web page.
Apart from watermarking the image, any normal images attached or displayed in an email cannot be copy protected in any way that the mail client software can support. However one can send copy protected images by using PDF protection software and then attaching that protected PDF to the email.
By adding the image to a document file and then converting that file to PDF can make the image difficult to copy, but to protect it from PrintScreen and screen capture, you need software to
copy protect PDF. Then while the image is on display in the copy protected PDF it cannot be copied or extracted.
Blog and social media websites provide a shared platform for users to add text and upload images. Usually text cannot be edited for custom HTML and image uploads will be limited to normal images such as JPG, GIF and PNG. So the upload of encrypted images will not be possible and adding custom code to display embedded images hosted elsewhere will also not be possible.
But that does not mean that the images that you post in blogs and social media cannot be protected. If the text that you can post can include HTML then it may be possible to embed an image hosted on a different site, such as your own website. For example, by using HTML like
<img src="http://example.com/image.php?pic=photo112.jpg"> the image will look normal but search engines will not detect it as an image and not be able to index or provide a link to it. Nor will users be able to right click to save the image. However PrintScreen will copy the image as seen on the page.
But most blogs and social media sites like FaceBook only allow text, so the only option then is to watermark the image. In fact watermarking may be a better alternative to embedded images because no-one will want to use an image that has another owner's copyright statement emblazoned on it.
Search engines will return numerous options for "content protection" techniques using "no-right-click" scripts which are absolutely useless for preventing image copy. Without the use of copy protection software that can stop PrintScreen and screen capture, the next best option is to use watermarks. Watermarked images can hamper presentation but they are a good deterrent to image theft because it obviously declares that it was stolen from elsewhere without the owner's authority to use it.
Image protect software such as the CopySafe Web Protection software is specially designed to copy protect images by encrypting them with domain lock so that the image files stored on the server are safe from company staff and your web master. While on display on your web pages CopySafe Web images are safe from all means of copy including PrintScreen and screen capture software.
CopySafe Web Protection can be used on any type of web page hosted on any type of web server. CMS plugins are also available to add copy protected images to web pages created by WordPress, Moodle, Drupal, Joomla and DNN.
If your website is hosted on your own dedicated or virtual server where you have Administrator rights to install software at system level, then you can use the ArtistScope Site Protection System (ASPS) which provides the most secure all round protection from all copy exploits that have ever been imagined.
ASPS will copy protect images, text and video. In fact anything that can be displayed on a web page will be most securely protected from all copy and data mining including extraction from browser cache and memory. ASPS creates a secure tunnel between website and the visitor's web browser by sending encrypted web pages that can only be decoded by the ArtisBrowser which in turn provides a read only experience.
The only media that ASPS cannot protect is PDF because while raw unprotected PDF can be displayed in a generic reader like Adobe Reader where save, copy and print options are persistently available, it cannot be protected. However to copy protect PDF one can use the CopySafe PDF Protection software which caters for desktop reading with DRM and online reading from web pages.
Author: William Kent
Date: 8th July 2020
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