Stealing Your Web Site's Photos

[Oregon Coast Guy]

There are some sites that has recently cropped up that are harvesting and stealing 1000s of photos and content from people's web sites.

I checked for my site's photos and they were indeed there. One site is being severely dealt with, but there are a few others actively doing the same crap. There may be a class action lawsuit in the works unless the comply.

Here's the video I made about it, explaining what they're doing and how to protect yourself - YouTube - STEALING YOUR WEB SITE PHOTOS!

 

[djbaxter]

The problem is that there's really not much you can do to protect your images once they're on the net, other than to file complaints with the site, the host, and the search engines if you find out they've been stolen.

You can watermark them to show the origin though, so anyone viewing them elsewhere knows where they came from. That may also be a deterrent for others to steal the image in the first place.

 

[Oregon Coast Guy]

You're correct. However, if we go harcore with enough of these site's, hopefully others will get the message that this kind of stuff is a no-no.

The best defense is a offense

 

[fsdnetwork]

I have the same problem with my product screenshots, Im a Software Directory, I planned to watermark these images with my company name.

Hope usefull

 

[yvesfra]

Use a flash animation that will load the picture. Browser cache the pictures, so there always a way to find them. As far as I know Flash doesn't cache them.

Don't put the picture inside the flash file, load them dynamically from your server. Don't write the direct path in the flash but a scramble code that work once, this need a bit of programming but you can find a lot a guy ready to help you at rentacoder for example.

But, at the end, the image is there and a "print screenshot" command can grab it & no way to stop this.