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Re: My solution to image theft

I've just noticed this information on preventing robots/spiders from the Google Image Search and other search engines indexing the images on your site. It comes from the bulletin of the American Society of Media Photographers.

Apparently, you can place a very specific text file in your site's root directory that tells the spiders not to look at certain folders. You can find all the details at http://www.asmp.org/newsandevents/news/newslines.html (scroll down to the end).

Of course, those photographers selling mainly in print and with only low res images on their site might think the Google Image Search is a neat way of bringing traffic to the site. Which is my view, so I've not tried it.

Graham Rice

http://GardenPhotos.com



In light of our thread earlier this week and all of the personal email
that I received about image theft, I thought I'd share my solution with
you.
There's no way to totally prevent image theft, but we can sure make it
harder for people.

With that in mind, hort.net now uses 'picsaw puzzles' (as a friend of
mine called it). The images are split up into as many 100x100 pixel
blocks as are necessary, are assigned seemingly nonsensical filenames,
and then have their positions stored in a database.

When an image is requested, a routine goes through and rebuilds the
image on the browser, but if anyone tries to download it they'll only
get a subpart.

Sure, they can download all of the parts and put them together, but
that's incredibly tedious. And there's nothing that can be done about
screen captures, either. But this prevents the kind of theft that
browsers like Internet Explorer have encouraged of late.

Here's an example page:

http://www.hort.net/gallery/view/sol/calmbye

Regarding the image names, they're obfuscated to prevent the automatic
regeneration of images by remote scripts and the like. It would be
trivial to write a program that trawls through a Web site and
rebuilds these pictures if they have names like a1, a2, a3. With
these names it requires a visual study (or access to the database) to
recombine them properly.

The long line of gibberish in the filename is also useful. It's actually
a checksum of the image subpart. This serves two purposes:

. I can tell if an image ever becomes corrupted on my own site because
the checksum won't match

. I can prove that someone stole an image by breaking it up along the
same boundaries as my copies. Running a checksum on the pieces
that I break up will match my checksum exactly, unless the image
has been modified

All 3000+ images at hort.net have been converted over to this scheme
now.

Anyhow, feel free to contact me *personally* if you have any questions
or comments. Otherwise we'll have to start yet another list: gardening
computer nerds or somesuch. :)

Chris

P.S. The next step is to make the pieces different sizes.

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GWL has searchable archives at:
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If you have photos for GWL, send them to gwlphotos@hort.net and they will
show up at: http://www.hort.net/lists/gwlphotos
_______________________________________________
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http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/gardenwriters

GWL has searchable archives at:
http://www.hort.net/lists/gardenwriters

If you have photos for GWL, send them to gwlphotos@hort.net and they will
show up at: http://www.hort.net/lists/gwlphotos
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