Pictures on the web

From the HTML Goodies newsletter:

How do you protect your pictures and graphics [on your website]? The answer is not popular. The answer is, "you don't."

It's the same problem Bruce Schneier points out with any sort of copy protection scheme. At some point, any information – text, graphics, audio, or any combination of the above – has to be made available in some form the user can perceive. Once it's in that form, it can be captured and saved. In the case of a web page, everything on the page exists in cache somewhere. Or, if the cache gets emptied somehow, you can view the source and access the direct URL of the image.

I'm sorry if this is bad news for you, but it is a basic fact of life. If this is a concern for you, you might want to refocus your efforts into the content on the site, and reduce the effort that goes into the graphics. If you want to have the pictures out there, but want to make it as hard as possible for somebody else to use your work, consider building a complex Flash or LiveMotion file, or something similar, that contains your identification information along with the pictures. This will help to stop all but the most hardened, and for them, it might just be too much work to be worth it.

Or tag it with enough identifying marks so there's no question as to who owns it.