It is disheartening to read how images shown on the internet can be taken and used by others. Is there a way of displaying images so that they cannot be downloaded?
Bill Peirce
If the image is on your screen then it has already been downloaded, but you can try to stop users from saving it by, for example, disabling the right mouse-click or hiding the picture under an overlay.
However, users can often get images from the browser cache, eg Temporary Internet Files, or grab them by using a screen capture program.
Some sites discourage theft by overprinting images with their address. Some use digital watermarking (digitalwatermarkingalliance.org). Web crawlers can identify these watermarked photos, so the copyright owner can take action to try to stop unauthorised uses of their images.
