DescentBB

A friend would like to share some of his photos using the Internet but since he also sells them he would like them not to be able to be \"saved as picture\" or printed.

I set him up with Picasa but found out that anyone he \"invites\" can also have the pictures printed.

Is there a way to disable the above functions on Picasa or is there another free program or service he could use?

If you can view it, you can also save it, copy it and print it.

Without even using any software out of what comes with Microsoft Windows I am able to save a perfect copy of any image I am able to view on the internet and do whatever I wish with it. There is no way to block or disable this functionality either. The only way he can prevent them from making or printing a copy, is to not share the image with them in the first place.

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What about websites that have disable the right-click\" option?

thewolfe wrote:What about websites that have disable the right-click" option?

disable javascript. hello right-click menu.

Thats the lazy way to do it, you can easily grab it from the web browser's cache. firefox's gives you a nice page(about:cache) to look through.

you could even save the page, and get the image's URL that way.

no, watermark and low res is the only way to do it

You could disable the mouse entirely...I'd still be able to make a copy of it easily. Here is how: while the browser window is on the screen and the picture is showing, press the printscreen key followed by the windows key + r, type \"mspaint\" then press enter, hit control + v for paste, hit control + s for save. You now have one perfect digital copy of the image.

thewolfe wrote:What about websites that have disable the right-click" option?

My preferred way of dealing with this:

In Firefox preferences:
Go to content tab.
Click on "Advanced" to the right of "Enable Javascript"
Uncheck "Disable or replace context menus"
Also, uncheck everything else in the list while you're at it. This makes the Internet so much less obnoxious.

I usually just use a picture browser to dig around in the temp directory..

Only way to prevent \"theft\" is a watermark across the pic.

Krom wrote:You could disable the mouse entirely...I'd still be able to make a copy of it easily. Here is how: while the browser window is on the screen and the picture is showing, press the printscreen key followed by the windows key + r, type "mspaint" then press enter, hit control + v for paste, hit control + s for save. You now have one perfect digital copy of the image.

True - but it's still only a screen-res version (72 dpi) and not much chop for commercial purposes.

Low res and watermarking is a good way to go. Another is embedding the image in a password protected PDF with image extraction turned off - then distributing the PDF instead. That way you can embed creative credits and copyright notices into the file as well.

Tell your friend (as an aside) that one of the best ways not to PROTECT copyright, but to PROVE OWNERSHIP of his images is to save a copy of all the photoshop layers if he does any retouching to the image inbetween taking the shot and publishing it to the web.

Cause if it ever comes down to enforcing his copyright, having the original image layers as evidence is pretty much proof positive! (Ever tried to reverse engineer a JPEG to recreate a layer once it's lost? Impossible is not the word!)

Course, if he shoots on film instead of digital, then he's got the negatives as proof of ownership as well.

If you were really hardcore, you could write (or find?) a program to use steganographic watermarking. Alter the least significant bit of every pixel--a change no one will notice--in a way that recombines to form a new message (or even a new photo!). Illegally copied photos could be analyzed and if the hidden message is discovered, GOTCHA! Cool stuff.

Gekko71 wrote:Another is embedding the image in a password protected PDF with image extraction turned off - then distributing the PDF instead. That way you can embed creative credits and copyright notices into the file as well.

Password protection is enforced with encryption. But faux security measures like disabling image extraction or disabling printing are opt-in. The only pdf viewer I have seen enforce them is the Adobe reader. This probably has something to do with the corresponding options to enable these "security measures" in Acrobat, which they want you to buy.

Jeff250 wrote:...faux security measures like disabling image extraction or disabling printing are opt-in. The only pdf viewer I have seen enforce them is the Adobe reader.

Good point Jeff - there are many non-Adobe PDF readers that don't recognise diabled printing / image extraction, so one should be careful with this particular option.

I'm not a big fan of non-adobe based PDF readers / creators for this very reason. PDFs were created by Adobe and have become the defacto standard in creating print-ready artwork for submission to off-set commercial printers. So 3rd party developers not implementing all the functionality of the PDF format to me makes very little sense. (No doubt it's a cost-centred proposition as you intimated.)