How can I lock my images to prevent others from taking them?

It seems that anyone can drag an image from my website – I wish to prevent this.

How can I prevent the images from being dragged or copied from my website?

Thanks for your help!
Yvette

I'm sure there are ways of disabling the saving of images, through jQuery or something, but there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a screenshot of the page with your image -- in other words, if someone really wants to steal your image, they will find a way.

I'd suggest applying a watermark to your images, and / or only uploading them as big as you need them (ie. not massive, HQ images). You could even downgrade the quality manually by saving them as lower quality .jpg's.

As kale pointed out there is really no easy way to stop someone from digitally lifting your photos. Even the most basic "screen print" function works.

In addition to watermarks and lower quality images, I would suggest a combination of both with real images being for sale or behind a password-protected site. This does not eliminate the problem but it does minimize it.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for your suggestions! It is harder than I thought it would be to protect the images.

So how does one put a water mark on the image?
How does one save photos as lower quality? Do I first save them in a smaller size, then upload them from the smaller saved image? I will have to delete all my images and then go through this lengthy process.... ! Any other ideas?

Best advice here is to put a watermark on your images.

There’s some really cool software that I use (sometimes) that has a really easy interface and links with stuff like Evernote and can export in most formats. Oh, and it’s free!

It's called Skitch and you can find it in the OS X App Store, for all other platforms, direct from Evernote.

Don’t reduce the quality of your work for piracy, do it for faster load times.

You can deactivate the right click for the whole site. That makes it harder to just copy the images with right-click(But doesn't save you from google images ;-) )

Add the code to SETTINGS / ADVANCED / CODE INJECTION > HEADER

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery
/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
$(function () {
$(this).bind("contextmenu", function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
});
});
</script>

We actually made a plugin to disable right clicking and dragging and dropping on only images, so you protect your intellectual property without compromising the user experience by disabling right clicking everywhere. You can get it for free at www.squareguru.com/content-protection