Image protection is one of the main website intellectual property
security issues for almost all webmasters.
Image theft is probably the most common form of web site content theft. All
owners of sites with high quality pictures of any kind, image galleries and
so on know that very well. Once some picture is posted online, it is being
stolen and used in other web sites almost immediately, in many cases after less than an hour. Putting watermarks
in images or copyright notices in your source code can't help at all.
To prevent this, some webmasters are forced to use java or activeX viewers,
but this is big browser compatibility problem - not more than 40-50 % of your
visitors will be able to see the secured content. According to the latest
statistics about 70% of the browsers are java enabled, but on most corporate
PC's running applets, as well as installing 3rd party activeX controls is strictly
prohibited. So such viewers provide relatively good security, but at the price
of losing more than the half of your potential visitors - they are not an effective
image protection solution.
With Encrypt HTML source, you can protect images on your website and
be sure they can't be stolen. At the same time, they can still be viewed in
any browser on any platform because only javascript support is required -
it is available in all recent browsers (don't mess javascript with java, those
are completely different things).
Your image files will be secured against:
- direct saving to disk - it is not possible to save a secured jpg, gif, png or
bmp file to your hard disk.
- Internet Explorer 6.0(and later) Image Toolbar - versions 6.0 and later of Microsoft's
Internet Explorer browser provide a very quick and convenient way to instantly
copy, save, print or even burn to a CD or DVD any picture you want - you just have
to put your mouse over it and select the desired action. This IE feature greatly
simplifies the content theft - but it can't be used for secured image files.
- retrieving from the browser's cache (temporary internet files)
- direct linking from other websites - many "web designers" directly
put in their pages links to images hosted on other servers, this way not only
stealing your content, but also your bandwidth which in most cases has to
be paid. So image protection can save you a lot of money as well, in case
you have to pay for the traffic.
- site rippers and download managers - many programs can download entire websites,
including all external files referenced in the html documents. With such a
tool, it is a matter of minutes to get just everything included in some website
- but only if it is not protected. All download managers and site ripping
tools will fail to retrieve the files from protected web pages.
Note that image protection has certain technical limitations, you can't
protect images in all available formats:
You can:
- protect jpg image files
- protect gif images (non-animated) . Animated gif's can't be protected
- if you do so, the resulting secured image will only show the first frame
of the animation. There are no limitations in regard to non animated gif files.
- protect bmp(bitmap) files
- protect png files (portable network graphics format, which is becoming more and more popular).
You can not:
- secure files in other formats such as tif, svg, etc. Only gif, jpg, png and
bmp files can be secured ( please look in the help file for the full list of the supported file types ).
- secure image maps or background images (page or table backgrounds) directly.
All the limitations of web image protection , the known problems and how to solve them is explained in details in the program's help files and in our online FAQ. Please read carefully all help sections in case you have problems to protect image files.