Protecting images

[VoodooJai]

Hi all this is my first post and I am a tattooist who is creating an online catalogue and need help in protecting my images from being ripped off by others. I have created a page that has a table with multiple cells that an image has been sliced up and placed into. I am now looking at using lightbox as a viewer but this uses a full image and not slices, can the images be placed into a folder that is only accessed by the viewer and cannot be down loaded by anyone. Or if someone has any better ideas let me know please.

Thanks in advance
VoodooJai

[jscheuer1]

For your kind of work, it may be somewhat impossible. First of all, no matter what you do, if they can see it on their screen, they can copy it. For folks dealing in visual property, the web can be a bit of a challenge. How do you show off your wares without giving them away?

For photographers and artists the answer is to use lower resolution images. These images look fine for web presentation and can be easily made in an image optimization program which will also reduce their byte size making them faster to load and less of a burden for web sites that have limits on the amount of server space and/or bandwidth they may use. Images of this sort will not print out well enough to sell or hang on the wall.

With tats though, I'm not sure. I imagine that even a low resolution image might be big and detailed enough to provide whatever sort of template a tattoo maker requires.

Don't be too concerned though. Unless someone goes out and copies your designs and then profits from them in a market in which you otherwise would have been able to 'make the sale', there really is no harm in them making a copy of your design. If they do actually steal a sale from you in this fashion (by first copying your design and selling it somewhere you could have sold it) and do it on any regular basis, you can sue them. Just informing them of this will usually make them stop. If this is an internet based operation that is doing this, just informing their ISP may work as well if the person themselves will not desist when asked. ISP's don't want to be liable for copyright infringement carried out by their customers and will often terminate the person's account or take other appropriate remedial action if informed of the infringement.

Added Later:

Another thing you can do is to put a watermark on your images but, in light of what else I have already said, this seems excessive to me and will make them look not as nice as they would without it. Folks tattooing from a watermarked image could just skip that part, fill it in in their mind as they work.

[techno_race]

There are some coll programs out there that change pictures into pure HTML. For example, a half-black half-white picture looks like:

<font color="#000000" style="font-size: 2px;">##########################################################################<br>#################################################################################################<br>###############...

[thetestingsite]

It's called ACSII art, and a pretty cool PHP script that does this is located here:
http://mrtwig.net/scripts_asciilizer.php

Hope this helps.

[djr33]

That's a pretty cool script, but I don't think it would help here as John says, because it would still show the design, which any decent tatoo artist can just fill in the blanks for.
I also find it weird that it upscales the image; it would be more useful if it made it the same size as the original image, but I understand... I guess it's doing one character per pixel.

[jscheuer1]

There are a number of programs for doing that as well. Once you have an ascii version (done that way) of an image though, the font-size can be changed to resize it to look just about like the original in both size and resolution.

[nwalton]

Back to the original question...

I think a Flash image viewer does a great job at keeping images from being downloaded, although that can be more difficult to implement. (You have to know Flash or get someone who does). Using Flash makes it so people can't just click on the image and save it, but of course there are still many of the other issues listed above.

[djr33]

Sure. The print screen key is magically disabled, isn't it? (For those who do not know, this is sarcasm.)

If people want to save the images, they will. The end.