Image stealing from websites is a common issue in the digital world. People often copy images from Google, Pinterest, Flickr and use them in their own website and other areas without the permission of creators. This is due to the extremely easy process of image saving from the web.
The point is people who earn their living from selling their own creativities would never like to get their hard work stolen by any random user without their consent and for free. It’s also a misuse of resource for many industries dealing with photographs and creative stuff.
You can never lock your images completely from being stolen on the internet but, there are some safety measures you can apply so that no one can have the fruits of your hard work. These following steps will show how you can protect photos from stealing on your website.
- Use Watermark on images
Watermark is the best way to protect your pictures from getting stolen. You can use any text as watermark like your name signature, brand name, company name or even brand logo so that it protects the authenticity of your images. Visual Watermark and Watermarkly care the two excellent softwares you can use to add watermarks instantly to a group of images before publishing them in the website. The watermarks are difficult to remove and people generally don’t touch images having watermarks.
2. Disable the Right click option
Everyone download images by right-clicking and then choosing the ‘Save As’ button. So, to protect your image identity, disable the right click menu option which you can do with the help of ‘No Right Click Images Plugin’ for Wordpress sites. With this plugin, you can disable from displaying the menu on image right-clicking by using Javascript. For more protection, also make a point to disable the ‘default image linking’. You can do it by choosing ‘none’ in the ‘link to’ field while uploading images on your website.
- Use DMCA badge
DMCA badge is excellent to protect your website from not only image thefts but also from the thefts of copying contents and degrading website’s SEO. This warns the online stealers targeting your content with legal action procedures on your behalf. As a result, when image stealers try to save or download the images from your website, they are easily scared by the message and would not attempt to go any further. If you are using Wordpress, DMCA plugin is available or you can also have the service from DMCA official website for ultimate protection.
- Disable Hotlinking
Hotlinking allows image stealers to use them directly on their website by loading directly from your image source. You can prevent this by disabling the hotlinking facility with the following code in the .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s) ?:// (www\.)?yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [F].
You can also restrict other sources to access your image like-
RewriteCond %( HTTP_REFERER} !^ http(s) ?:// (www\.)? facebook.com [NC] //for Facebook//
RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER} !^ http(s) ?:// (www\.)? google.com [NC] //for Google//
And so on.
- Register image with Copyright
One of the best legal ways to protect your website image from unauthorized use is by registering your website with the copyright office. USCO is one of the best copyright offices to protect your website legally from unauthorized use. For more specific results, add a copyright notice. For-ex- © 2019 Jon Doe All Rights Reserved. Copyrights need to be updated every year to protect the authenticity of your website. This does not prevent the stealers from downloading your image but they cannot use it anywhere due to the copyright notice.
