(Transparent Images) Protecting Photos from Visitors

Hi i'm currently designing a website and would like some of the photos not be available to the user. I hear that transparent photos is an option, how is this done?
Also would creating the photo in a .swf format also protect it from being taken?
I understand that print-screens can be done and the file is downloaded to the user cache, there is no way around this i assume? But i still would like to take certain measures such as swf and transparent images but how is this done?

 

You place a transparent GIF on top of the image so that when someone clicks with the right mouse buttom and copies an image they will copy the trasparent gif. It is very easy to overcome this type of protection.

If someone wants to copy your image they will find a way to do it. If you concern is other people putting your images on their site and consuming your bandwidth install Image Hotlink Log and Control

 

You can digitally watermark your images so that if someone steals them, you can prove that they are your images. But as stated, there's pretty much no way to completely protect them.

 

placing them in a flash file doesn't help either. It's pretty easy to decompile a .swf file these days

 

No decompiling needed.

They press PrntScrn,
They open PhotoShop,
They paste.

Watermarking is the best option...

 

It is impossible to totally protect your images from being ripped - but you can slow down a lot of people with a lot of different methods.

Put the img up as a bg image and put a transparent gif on top of it - stops newbs only and hardly worth the effort.

Only use an image that is of the minimum quality acceptable to you and as small as possible. EG, if you take a digital photo and you want to sell prints you would possibly put a 60% jpg, 72dpi, 500px max image on your website.

Watermark your images - making them unusable for others. A watermark can be a word in 1 corner or a 10% opaque mark across the middle. A word can probably be easily cropped out - so just make sure.

In reality, accept that some scumbag will attempt to rip your images and use your common sense about what steps you should take in each situation. For example, if using a couple of photos on a blog, you would probably opt to use smallish, lower quality jpgs and leave it at that, but if you were selling stock photos, you would probably go for displaying a small to medium sized image with a 10% opaque mark on it so it is not usable.

 

i vote a visible not too obtrusive watermark + digital watermark + not the most astounding quality=as good as you can get.

 

There's stuff you can do to help prevent photo protection, but nothing you can do to stop it. It's easy to get someone else's images - so if you're so worried about it, don't put it on the net.