Image Protection and Other Myths

I've spent a couple of weeks on Yahoo! Answers, now, and (besides from the Quick Fix thing) I've noticed another trend…

People and questions don't change over time. They just move on to a new niche. In the number of years I've spent being online and perusing web forums and tech support site, the same questions keep popping up, over and over and over and over…

One of the questions (repeated a number of times in the course of a couple of days) was whether or not is is possi-… no.

One of the questions (repeated a number of times in the course of a couple of days) was how do you protect your images from people stealing them? Not "can you"… "how do you".

An unfortunate amount of people mentioned the tired and disproven methods of the JavaScript no-right-click method (and seriously, I wanna shoot people who even consider that crap) or hiding a picture behind a DIV.

People: remember this: if it's online, others will get to it.

There are no fool-proof methods other than resorting to using ActiveX controls (which rules out millions of Linux (and Mac… I keep forgetting about Apple followers) users from ever visiting your site) which literally disables the PrintScreen button.

Anyway… another question on Answers (the answer to which caused someone to throw a big fat LOL at me) made me wonder and ponder… so I started toying around a bit…

The result can be seen here: My Playground – Proof of concept: Hiding Images. If anything, it's an entertaining read (if I say so myself), that should once and for all convince people that no, you cannot prevent people from stealing your images.