When you publish images on a website they can be downloaded, printed and hyperlinked by your site visitors. You can try to protect your web images using a few simple tricks. There are many Javascripts that will disable the right click on the visitors' browsers, preventing them from printing or saving certain images or other content from your website. But the script action can be bypassed by viewing the source code of the webpage and as a consequence the image location will be found.

As an alternative you can use another method, for example to put your image in the background of a table, and in front of it add a transparent image. The visitor will save the invisible image in this case. But still your image can be downloaded. You can encrypt your image or use server side scripts that will not allow the user to hyperlink your image, but the reality shows that when you publish your images on the Internet there is no way to protect them totally from printing or downloading.

In case you run a photo blog site or have a commercial photo gallery, there are some general practices concerning the image file processing. In the first place, you must assure that the image format and resolution will give visitors only the most essential image details. For example, you can provide only a small thumbnail of an image or image with low resolution and thus the image could not be printed or rescaled for printing. You may leave the image at its original size and use watermarking techniques. You can add a visible watermark or invisible digital watermark.

The visible watermark must be another image consisting of a transparent text that will be added to a convenient zone of the protected image. The text must be invisible in order to minimize the interferences with the original image. You can do the image superposition with any photo editor. The transparent text could be a copyright notice or your name for example. A digital watermark can be added with various softwares, like XAT Image Optimizer. The removal of watermark takes more time and as a consequence this method of image protection is used on a large scale.