Protecting Digital Images
Most people aren't particularly concerned with personal use ( in fact I don't mind people downloading photos for their own personal use as a wallpaper in their O/S ). Instead, we're looking to prevent commercial use of our photos, as much as that's possible. Locks only stop honest people, though, and we should keep in mind that any photo on the internet can be copied - in fact it has to be downloaded to display on your screen. Instead, this article looks at different ways to make wholesale theft more difficult and time consuming, so less profitable.
Contents
- Watermarks
- Transparency
- ImgRed.com - Special Case
Watermarking Your Images
Watermarks will stop honest people who don't realize an image is copyrighted from republishing it. They'll also at least slow down dishonest people; they can be difficult to clone away, and in the center of an image, they can't be cropped. Unfortunately, this can marr a photo, so you may prefer to put the watermark in a corner.
In Photoshop:
- Select the Type Mask Tool ( T )
- Enter the copyright symbol, ( on a PC, hold alt down while typing 0169 on the numeric keypad ), hit space, than type your name
- Click the marquee or lasso tool, and the text you typed out will become a selection; with another selection tool you can move it
- Finally, click Layer -> New -> Layer via Copy, and then apply styling to new layer, created from your selection. A drop shadow seems to work.
An example of this method is at right; you may want to use "invisible" watermarks for added protection. These won't deter misuse, but they'll make a court case easier if it has to come to that.
Use Exifer (freeware) to embed your copyright and authorship into the image's meta-data. Digimarc, which comes with Photoshop, adds a fine grained pattern into your photos, a mathematical representation that can survive even pretty intense editing. It's not a cheap solution, but might be useful in the right circumstance.
ImgRed - Image Redirection Service
A new service ( imgred.com ) has turned up that tells people it's bad citizenship to "hot-link" images from another host because it's more or less stealing bandwidth. Their solution is to download a copy of the image from your site to their server, and then allow their users to access it from there. They suggest "message boards and blogs," while articles hyping the service talk about myspace as an ideal use.
It isn't clear how the service intends to be profitable, and advertising doesn't seem to be the answer. Still, a third-party web site is building up a collection of images over time. There's no contact information on the site, and an opt-out request I sent to info@imgred.com bounced back. I could try guessing sales@imgred.com, admin@imgred.com, and so on, until one of them hopefully worked ... and if anybody wants to try that, good luck. Note: The web site is registered to this email address: b00e4e590a1e67280123100a9e40110b@domaindiscreet.com, according to whois.
Part of publishing content on the web means you give up total control over it. But people do things that are easy to make it harder to take your images - like watermarking them. Banning this particular service from your web site is fairly easy if you use Apache as a web server ( and probably 90 % of web sites do ). Simply begin your .htaccess file with the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} imgred\.com
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
<Files 403.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>
deny from 64.131.64.202
I've done some testing, and this prevents the service from downloading your images, and doesn't break the site in general. If you're already using mod_rewrite, any rules you have in place will continue to work; simply put them after "deny from 64.131.64.202" in the code. You might need to change 403.shtml depending on your site.