Ask Felgall

There is nothing that you can do in the HTML, stylesheet, or JavaScript that will protect the images on your web site from being stolen. The best form of protection is to either place a watermark in the image itself or to embed the image into a PDF with associated text that indicates the copyright. Those methods will not prevent your image being stolen but will identify it as stolen when the thief tries to use it.

The next most effective way after that is an HTML solution which reduces the chance of casual theft of your images by placing them behind a second transparent image. This will mean that someone who steals images using their context menu will most likely save a copy of the transparent image instead of the one they intended to take and will possibly not notice until much later that they didn’t get the image they thought they had saved. This will not prevent them saving the image some other way but since you are not making it obvious that you have blocked their ability to save the image through their context menu they they may decide that it is not worth the effort of returning to your site to use some other method of saving the images.

Partial Protection of Images