Image theft is rife on the internet and something people need to consider when publishing media online.

Some of our users ask how can they prevent image theft when using WordPress.

This guide will show you way to protect your images online using WordPress websites.

Disable Right Mouse Click

The majority of users attempt to steal images from websites using the right click button on the mouse, then “save image as”. This allows people to save your images to their local hard drive. Unfortunately after they have downloaded the image to their hard drive YOU lose control how that use can distributed. You can prevent this by disabling the right button on the mouse, which prevents users from saving images. Two plugins that can assist you with enabling this feature is

WP Content Copy Protect

This plugin is freely available online and allows you to disable the right mouse click when people are browsing your WordPress website.

It should be noted that this will disable the right click button entirely, not just for downloading images. This could lead to technical problems when using sliders for example. Speak to your technical support or contact our friendly team at Envision if in doubt.

Envira Gallery

Envira is a very establish plugin available online. It is rich in features, one of these features includes image protection add on.

When this is enabled, the right click is disabled right you right click on an image.

Watermark

You can protect your images by adding a watermark. This will permanently change the image. If anyone copies the image, it will be very where clear where the image originated from.

Watermarks can include text or images, and be discrete or very displayed prominently in the image.

A good technique is for the watermark to include your website address, then if someone copies it, people will know where the image came from.

Also do not put the watermark at the edge of the image, and someone could just crop the image to remove your watermark. So try and display this across the image.

However, you should note this will not prevent someone from copying your images, see this as a deterrent only.