When photographers talk about wanting to prevent theft of their images, many don’t realize that they need to disable a single feature that many don’t realize even exists. In fact, many photographers wouldn’t realize it unless they are are well versed in the ways of HTML and coding–and not many photographers are that well versed. As designs in photo websites and websites in general change, designers are now trying to find a way to make websites perfect for both desktops and mobile devices without adding a mobile theme of some sort.
Sure, folks can still screen shot your site and try to take an image–but the quality will be absolutely horrid. The way for someone to really get to your images starts with right clicking on a site while at a desktop. When someone is on their desktop, they can choose to inspect the elements of the site. Then (at least on Google Chrome) if the person decides to go over to resources and then images, they can peruse through the images and find the original that was uploaded. This is a far better way for someone to get the image that is on your site.
So how do you prevent this from happening? The best way is to disable right clicking on desktops and and long pressing on mobile devices. If you’re a photographer that has been in the industry for many years, it’s time to start changing your site up and getting out of the archaic designs. Clean interfaces are in, and many folks look at your website from some sort of tablet.
When we say that you should disable right clicking, you should do it all over the site–not only just on the images or the text links. If someone can find the small area of the site to right click on, then they can access all of the HTML coding and snag the image.
Even better: if you make the website navigable only by button presses or gestures you can disable any sort of theft to begin with.