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Is there anyway to get Joomla to prevent people from stealing images from the site? Is there a something in the system setting or maybe an addon. I need this to meet some legal requirements for my site http://www.cdnpapermoney.com/cpm.

What do you mean with stealing, just saving images that are shown on your site?

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Take care

The only image protection mechanism I've seen is through .htaccess and mod_rewrite, but this only prevents other sites from linking directly to them.

A quick Google searched yielded this result:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/3272.htm

I would be wary of using mod_rewrite, test your site from many machines, I had some problems with it but didn't really play with it for too long.

I remember seeing a site that implemented a javascript rollover as some type of image protection.  You can code this up such that when the user's mouse is hovering over an image, the image is replaced with another (perhaps a blank image).  Then, if the user right-clicks (or control-clicks) they receive an option to download and save the replacement image.  I think it was some kind of site that sold posters.

The weakness in this technique is that their images were in a simple directory that could be seen on the source code.  For instance, the right-click method did not allow a visitor to save the desired image, but by looking at the source code for the page and then placing the entire address to the specific image one could download it.  In this situation, the image would be loaded into the browser by itself without the protecting javascript code.  Basically, this might help you a little, but it only provides security against those who don't know anything about source code.

If you are on a *nix based server using cPanel, you should have access to "Hotlink Protection".  The hotlink "blurb" in cPanel says this:


This has worked a charm for me for years now.

I've also been known, when finding an image I knew was mine to rename the image for my site, then load a new one with the old name, and the new image had "Dirty bandwidth thief" in red letters on black background on it.  If after a request they haven't stopped, you do the switch, and watch how long it takes for them to stop stealing that image   Bit childish, but efficient

vavroom love your sense of humour ... simple and great strategy

Must move on that

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Thanks everyone.

Yes, I'm trying to prevent people from "right clicking" and saving files to their hard drive. I've used a Javascript on the old site that prevents the "right click" from working and it even prevents the images from downloading into the users cache. This way the images cannot be accessed by anyone's local computer (in this case, to make counterfeit banknotes). I didn't think my images where scanned at enough resolution to be a problem, until the police showed me a counterfeit note that had been passed with my watermark one it. 

I've use the "Hotlink Protection" and that seems to work, but it's not the complete solution to protecting the images, I need to keep them off of local drives entirely. 

And since I'm just a "power abuser", not a coder, I need easy to implement solutions. I'll keep looking, but thanks for the pointers.

I wonder... is there a way you can overlay a transparent image on top of the main image?  Then, if someone passes over your other right-click protection, they are still only saving the transparent image.  Maybe another implementation is to ignore the image input via Joomla and use some type of javascript reference so that your source directories are not so easily found.

I've never been too worried about lifting my images with a right click.  Oh, yes, it's bothersome, and can be downright agravating.  I know someone who saw their entire site be "lifted", image and all, and reused.  But if someone's determined enough to get your stuff, they will..

javascript protection from right-click is nice, but...  only requires someone to disabled javascript and the image becomes available again   Not worth the bother in my book.

I'm much more worried about bandwidth, where someone stealing an image from your site and uses it as an avatar on an active forum, for example, can see your bandwidth go up in leaps and bounds...

Cheers

I like the "transparent image" idea. I'll have to think about that one, though the underlay image would still be in the cache...

As for linking, the problem isn't bandwidth, it counterfeiting. With the RCMP and the Bank of Canada breathing down my neck and wanting to close down the site, I've got to find a way to protecting the images and plastering a huge ugly watermark on them all is not very attractive. Now, if there where an automatic way to apply the watermark on the fly...

ah, but back to reality.

Ahhh, yes, I've just gone to the site now and see your problem...  Sorry, don't have a solution

Have you had a look at Amazon.com they have used some fancy way of showing excerpts from books so that they can't be copied/saved.  I think it only worked with IE though.  Probably used ActiveX or some such.  I'm not an expert on those type of things.  All I know is that it always annoyed me as I use Opera (or Firefox if I'm desperate) but could only see the pages at work with IE.

Still as most people use IE it would be better than nothing (or a visit to the local prison) for you I suppose.

Amazon uses the transparent image method along with some javascript.
In IE it is easily defeated by first opening a new window (control-N) and then looking at the source.
Various Firefox extensions may do the same thing.

The hardest ones to grab are buried in multiple Flash file links along with javascript links.
Good site mirror software will follow all these Flash and javascript links and download the images.

And you can always screen grab it.

I cannot see how anything but watermarking will satisfy the regulators.
Exactly what have they requested?

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Try this

Required ... PHP 4+ and GD 2.0+

A file you call 'watermark.png' should be located in the same directory as the code (below). If not, change the file path in the following code, which will load the watermark image. The file should be a PNG-8 format file, not PNG-24.

Make the watermark.png say whatever you like on it our you could use a semi opaque/ opaque copyright symbol



See how you go with that? 

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hmm maybe You could say where to put it in the joomla code? thanks

Oops 

In your template index.php

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We cannot become what we need to be ... by remaining what we are

I've yet to find a mechanism that stops people from simply saving the page (in doing so all images are saved) or alternatively simply doing a screen print which essentially produces the same result.

Personally I gave up trying... but would be interested if there is something out there I don't know about.

Cheers
Shayne

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I agree Shayne but at least a water mark makes life difficult when  people try that.

The other thing is if the iamges are of insufficient quality then no body will bother.

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CdnPaperMoney,

It is very difficult to pretect your images. The best protection is not to put them online. 

If you want some first line protection, use this code in the head section of your page:



This prevents to show the small toolbar on your images in IE.

CU
Karel

Never tried this and I assume you could not then use zoom gallery. Counterfitters are normally lazy, maybe you clould slice you images into multiple uneven pieces and put it in a table. Could turn out to be more work that they are willing to do to put them back together. Many counterfitters use photo-copies and plain images and use the most basic of image editors and printers. 

Regards,

Lance

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Almost always, the hardest thing to do and the right thing to do are are the same thing.

Would it be possible to use a variation of this to make a php coded version of the blank.gif image protection method? I have code for doing it with tables and with divs, but seeing as how the images I need to protect are being served up by virtuemart, I need a php coded version of the method. Been searching high and low for a way to do this, have tried countless diffferent attempts myself, and have failed every try:( So if this can somehow be manipulated into a php version of the blank image over laying the real image in the background method of image protection, I would love to know!

Thank you,
David Henderson

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Thanks,
David Henderson

Sorry, old thread I know... someone mentioned overlaying a transparent gif.

Would it be possible to write a system mambot or something that adds this for all images OR, replaces all img tags with div tags, setting the image as the background using CSS (perhaps with a transparent gif inside the div)?

I know it's not foolproof but every deterrent helps.

Watermarking is now very easy in rsgallery. You can set transparancy and size. Works like a charm.

We've used watermarking on some sites and it does work very nicely. The problem is with the client's logo which cannot be watermarked for obvious reasons.

I'm hoping it's possible to use a mambot (like the email protection one) to convert/protect all images automatically... particularly ones that aren't being managed by a gallery system. A really clever mambot could have configuration options to add a watermark to all content images and to add a watermark to non-content images (like a logo) if the referrer doesn't match the site or is blank.

I have used the following script, that upon right click, opens  popup with your indicated size , text ...ect. But this does not stop the skilled image grabbers. If someone wants to get an image, they will get that image regardless what you put there.

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Come on ppl you cant tell me no-one has made a plug in for this!

i need that as well seeing a client of mine has an e-shop with a lot of product images that need to be protected!

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http://www.alfonsscholing.com

grafisch I think you are wishing on a star here ... if I want to grab an image I will

I'm thinking your only option is to visibly water mark each image as some of the commercial image sites do.

Remember this isn't a Joomla issue it's a web issue

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I just tried using the code and all i got was a heap of errors at the top of the page.
I put a watermark.png image in the template folder.






Warning: imagecreatefrompng(watermark.png) [function.imagecreatefrompng]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/......./index.php on line 102

Warning: imagesx(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/....../index.php on line 103

Warning: imagesy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /......./index.php on line 104

Warning: imagecreatetruecolor() [function.imagecreatetruecolor]: Invalid image dimensions in /home/......./index.php on line 105

Warning: imagecreatefromjpeg() [function.imagecreatefromjpeg]: Filename cannot be empty in /home/......./index.php on line 106

Warning: getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]: Filename cannot be empty in /home/...../index.php on line 107

Warning: imagecopymerge(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/..../index.php on line 110

Warning: imagejpeg(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/....../index.php on line 111

Warning: imagedestroy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /...../index.php on line 112

Warning: imagedestroy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/....../index.php on line 113

i would like to know aswell.. been looking for it for while. A customer asked me about this feature and i said as someone posted if you want to show and someone can see it they can grab it no matter what you do. For him its more of the designs he dont want anyone to copy..

if you can see the image, you can grab it. put copyright watermarks on it.

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