From the many questions I receive it's clear that protecting ones assets is a subject of interest and worry for many.
The following table Summarizes the different protection methods sorted by their effectiveness.
Method | Pros | Cons | Opinion |
Post only unimportant images | Not much | Not much either | Why bother to have a Web presence if not to display your best? |
Post reduced Size low quality images | Better than above | Worse than above | Might leave wrong impression on your browsers |
Visual watermark, as copyright text visible on the image. | States ownership of images | Time consuming, can be removed | Reducing image quality for the viewers, distracting |
No right mouse button | None | Doesn't work on non PC | Waist of time, Mac users won't even know it's there |
Transparent image on top of actual one | Better than above | None | Better than all above, doesn't stop capturing your images. |
Embeding the images into a Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime presentation | Image quality maintained | No protection at all | Time consuming, offers no protection |
Digital watermark | Hidden, not many know it's there | Not many know it's there | Verification on the web needs a web spider service, to trace the images. Gives the most in proving ownership |
Digital watermarking
Digimarc ImageBridge plugin for Adobe Photoshop, is a subscription based service available from Digimarc. After registration with Digimarc (up to 99 images for free) one gets a PIN and ID numbers. Using this info the plugin embeds a digital code into the image. This code is applied as a noise or grain pattern to the image. Since the code can withstand alterations to the image and still be readable. The strength of the noise - code is set in the plugin, less visible = less durable, more visible = more durable!
Since Digimarc is available for the major imaging software any one can verify the existence of a Digimarc watermark in an acquired or downloaded image.
Once the photos are on the Web and one wants to trace if and where the images were copied to, Digimarc offers a Digimarc MarcSpider an image tracking which is also subscription based. MarcSpider will spider the Web returning reports which contain details on when and where the protected images are found.
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