Protecting Your Web Site Images
Author of this post: Karen Morrill-McClure | About Blog Authors »
Checking on the incoming links to my blog one day, I found a link to a photo from one of my posts. I was surprised to see that another blog was using my photo in one of their posts. They didn’t give any credit to me for the photo, though they did link back to it.
I spent some time trying to figure out how they’d found that photo to use and didn’t come up with any firm answers. I even emailed the blog writer, but got no response. It did open my eyes a bit to something I know can be a problem: people taking the images on your web site and using them elsewhere.
The fact is that anyone can download the regular images (jpegs and gifs) I put up on my web site. The same is true of all my clients’ web sites. And they don’t even have to download the images, they can just link to the image (as the above mentioned blog did). Just because they can download the images doesn’t mean they are allowed to use those images. Those images belong to me (either I took them myself or I purchased them for use), they can’t use them on their own site just because they can download them.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that people won’t do just that. The nature of the web makes it easy for people to take images from other sites (in fact, some people take whole site designs, but that’s another issue).
If your clients are concerned about this (perhaps they are photographers) then there are a few things you can do:
Watermark your images - put your name or web site across the photo or along the bottom of the photo. I’ve seen examples with the web site address along the bottom of the photo. Unobtrusive and effective.
Use scripts to make the images impossible to download - not my favorite option. I don’t like adding scripts to my web pages unless I absolutely have to. Also these scripts may not work on all browsers/computer operating systems.
Put the images up in a different format - if you put them up as a Flash .swf file, people can’t use them as easily. They could still link to your image and use it on their site, but they won’t be able to take the image and make changes to it.
You should also think about all the ways that images get out there on the web. If you use a photo sharing site (like Flickr or Picasa) make sure you check your settings to see if people can download your images.
You may also want to take your site out of the Google Image search. You can do that by editing (or creating) your robots.txt to include these lines:
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
That will keep the Google Image Search robot from indexing any of your image files. More information about the robots.txt file is available in my Google Webmaster Tools – Part 5 Post
March 21st, 2008 at 11:15 am
Thanks for the article! I hope you hear a response from the blog writer soon. If bandwidth theft really becomes a problem and you have a web host that allows you to edit your .htaccess files and comes with mod_rewrite enabled in apache, you can explicitly prevent this type of linking to your images. Do a Google search for “mod_rewrite prevent off-site linking to images” or take a look at a tutorial like this one: http://bignosebird.com/apache/a13.shtml
March 22nd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Wow i hadn’t even thought about that. Thanks for raising the awareness.
March 24th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Thanks for raising an important copyright issue.
Unfortunately, it very difficult to protect web audio/video from those who wish to steal it and use it for their own profit.
However, I noticed that Adobe Flash makes it harder to copy images and video off the web.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I had success with watermarking images…I think that is the way to go….especially if the watermark standsout….or you can you use your url in the watermark and get some traffic out of the deal
March 31st, 2008 at 7:49 am
Hi, I also get angry with the hot link images but now I can make my image is not steal anymore by redirect it into my image which is said “you steal my image from yourdomain.com” :D
it’s really fun when I can do it and see the result. I need to change the .htaccess file and you can generate it from http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/
try it and I hope you like my method :D
March 31st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I don’t mind people stealing my images, but bandwidth theft is another thing, they use our bandwidth display our picture and take credit for that, I can’t tolerate that. I too, updated my .htaccess to prevent this, you should try this too.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I had success with watermarking images…
May 30th, 2008 at 9:25 am
I dont watermark my images because it spoils the image, but i can understand why people might. What would be great is if there was a way to locate your images on the web, then you could take the appropriate legal action…
June 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Kit - see http://www.tineye.com
June 18th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I pretty routinely use images from other people’s blogs & websites on my blog. If there’s an image I want to use and it isn’t downloadable or linkable, I usually just take a screenshot of it.
I can understand being miffed at your image being used if another person explicitly takes credit for it. But I’m less certain how it harms you if someone uses in it such a way that they aren’t claiming authorship (and in fact are linking back to your site).
Presumably it isn’t hurting you financially since you aren’t selling the image. Perhaps you wish the image to be unique to your site, but that’s really a pretty abstract idea since it’s probably pretty rare that someone who visits your site also happens to visit the site of the person who is using your image. Those who do visit both sites are probably doing so because they’re following the image’s link (so that the person borrowing the image is actually promoting your site).