Redframe realizes that your images are your art and livelihood, and that image theft is a persistent problem across the Internet. To help protect your images, all Redframe websites come with a number of image protection features automatically enabled, such as:
- Disabled Right Clicks: Right-clicking your mouse or trackpad on a website usually opens a context menu in your browser which includes, among other options, the ability to save the image directly to your computer. All Redframe websites permanently disable right clicks in order to prevent this easy image theft.
- Disabled Drag and Drop: In most modern browsers, you can save an image on a website by clicking on the image, then dragging and dropping it into a folder on your computer. When you drag and drop an image from a Redframe gallery, however, only a 1×1 invisible GIF file will be transferred.
- Maximum Image Resolutions: Redframe resizes all your images to be optimized for your website layout. When you upload your images, you can choose what you want the maximum size of the longest side of your images to be. The default is 1200px, but you can upload your images at lower resolutions if you are worried about stealing higher resolution copies (see Upload Images to your Gallery).
- No High Resolution Originals: Redframe does not keep the original high resolution image files that you upload. When an image file is uploaded, we save several resized copies of it and then delete the original, thereby speeding up your website’s load time while also making it impossible for someone to steal your high resolution originals.
- Virtual Watermarks: Another technique for stealing images is to take a screenshot of a website, then extract the image from the screenshot using image editing software. To protect against this, Redframe offers virtual watermarks for big images in your galleries. Virtual watermarks non-destructively apply semitransparent copyright information over your image using the website’s code; your image file is not altered by the watermark (see Add Watermarks to your Images).
- Private Galleries: You can designate individual Galleries or even entire Folders as Private. Images in Private Galleries are only viewable by your Customers, and you control what Customers have access to which Private Gallery. Customers must sign in with their email address and password to access their Private Galleries (see Create a Private Gallery or Folder).
Important Considerations
First of all, let’s start with the plain and simple truth: the only way to be absolutely certain that your images will never be downloaded or stolen off a website is to never put them online in the first place.
There will always exist ways of stealing images from a website—after all, for an image to appear on a user’s computer, the file has to actually be sent across the internet to their web browser. A determined enough programmer will always be able to scrape image assets from any website. Fortunately, the protection measures used by Redframe are strong enough to thwart the vast majority of internet users from easily stealing your images.
The best way to prevent image theft:
Digitally watermark your all your images BEFORE you upload!
Digital watermarks are permanent, aka “destructive” changes to the image file. You can use any photo editing software such as Photoshop or Lightroom to embed a semitransparent overlay of your logo or copyright info directly into the image file itself. With a digital watermark applied, anyone who does manage to steal the image will have to manually remove the watermark using editing software (a very tedious process).
If you use digital watermarks on your images, remember two things:
- Keep backups of the original images – WITHOUT the watermark! – on your computer. Since only watermarked versions will be available on your website, you will need to email or Download Dock the originals to your Customers upon request.
- Turn off Redframe’s Virtual Watermarks on your Galleries. In most cases, having both watermarks applied to your Images won’t look quite right and will distract from your Gallery.
If you have any other questions about Image Protection and your Redframe website, please contact Redframe Support.