Stop stealing my images!

One of the problems with xoog is that so many people are copying and pasting the images and putting them on their myspace profiles. for a while i have decided that this is good, as they dont get rid of my watermark and it means people come to xoog and the brand gets circulated.

more recently i have decided that i want to create my own myspace codes, which allows me to monitor xoog's influence through extremely clever coding - which is too clever to mention publically :-)

I have done a lot of reading and it is pretty well established that webmasters can only make it difficult for users to steal their images, not impossible. this in mind, I am going to make it as hard as possible.

Lots of suggestions have been made in the forums and articles, and from what I see it is important to use a combination of techniques to make it as hard as possible.

Problem: Users stealing images

Solution:

- Prevent users from right-clicking - No! Dont do this.
DO... Put the image in the background of a cell, and then put a stretched transparent .gif/.png for added effect. The average user will be confused that when they successfully save the image to their computer, they will only have a transparent image. extremely off-putting to them.

- Stop users from printing the screen. This can be done in javascript, I
(think) I have found the code to do this although as this isnt a coding blog im going to make you find it yourself.

- Encrypt the source. This only works with javascript enabled, although it prevents people from finding the hidden filename that is in the background of the cell.

- Convert the image to a swf! This can stop copy and pasting, I dont know why people havent mentioned this in their articles or forum posts... For xoog I cannot do this, hnowever, because I need users to be able to click on the image to record certain information.

- Watermarks. A lot of people believe watermarks are the best way to stop the stealing of images. not me. I want my site to be user friendly - how can it be with huge and complex watermarks?? One on the bottom right is fine for me.