Photo protection can be bypassed?

JohnR

Wasn't sure if this was discussed here or not, but thought I would ask.

Apparently javascript can be disabled on a browser so that you can right-click on an image. Thus bypassing the protection offered by Smugmug.

http://javascript.about.com/library/blright.htm

There are quite a few people under the mistaken belief that a no right click script will protect their page content. A no right click script does nothing of the sort but it may interfere with your navigation of their site in those browsers where it does anything at all. Rather than just giving up on their site though you can instead just turn that script off.

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So I guess the best way is to just make your images small?

jfriend

Notes about right-click protection

JohnR wrote:

Wasn't sure if this was discussed here or not, but thought I would ask.

Apparently javascript can be disabled on a browser so that you can right-click on an image. Thus bypassing the protection offered by Smugmug.

http://javascript.about.com/library/blright.htm

There are quite a few people under the mistaken belief that a no right click script will protect their page content. A no right click script does nothing of the sort but it may interfere with your navigation of their site in those browsers where it does anything at all. Rather than just giving up on their site though you can instead just turn that script off.

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So I guess the best way is to just make your images small?

Did you try it? Turning JavaScript off won't get you a copy of the image with the right-click menu. It will get you an image, but it won't be the one you want, it will be a blank image. Smugmug's right click protection is more sophisticated than the protection mentioned in the article you reference.

Since this seems to need to be repeated regularly, there is no such thing as perfect right-click protection. In order to view the image in the browser, it HAS to be posssible for a piece of software on a PC to download the version meant for screen display (that's what the browser has to do to display it to you). The right-click protection that smugmug provides makes it more difficult to get a copy of an image (this will successfully block many non-technical folks), but does not make it impossible and can never make it impossible.

If you want it to be impossible to get a copy of your image, then you need to either not post it online or use fairly large watermarking or only post small sizes that you aren't worried about being copied.

Andy

very well said