I have a cat website and have had some good pictures taken of some of my cats. The person who took the pictures gave them to me - all JPEGs - without any form of watermark. I would like to give her credit and also to protect them from being stolen from my website. Is there some way in which I can

a ) mark the pictures with the photographers name?
b ) prevent the pictures from being copied or downloaded?

Any advice would be very welcome. Thanks in advance for your time.

regards

Rraa
www.bobergsiamese.co.uk

It is nearly impossible to stop people from downloading pictures on a web site on the internet. For the most part, having people steal pictures is not a problem. The best way to stop people from downloading is by having a flash web site- but those are expensive to get made, and complicated to do yourself. Still, it isn't perfectly protected.

Watermarks/copyright.- The easiest way to give credit to a photographer is to have a footnote at the bottom of the page, or on your about/contact page. Usually a copyright is put at the bottom of a page. Most sites have one. this is yahoo's- "

Copyright © 1994-2009 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Guidelines
NOTICE: We collect personal information on this site.
To learn more about how we use your information, see our Privacy Policy"

google has a much shorter one- "©2009 - Privacy"

It is, by definition, impossible to simultaneously display an image on a web page and prevent it from being downloaded. And creating a website entirely in Flash is considered harmful by many people (myself included)^{1, 2}

One way to prevent people from directly hotlinking to your images (and thereby stealing your bandwidth) is to use an .htaccess file. Talk to your web host about whether they have the necessary server configuration to use .htaccess (most commercial hosts do.)

Thanks Vaerli and Andy for your replies.

It is as I suspected. OK - I don't really see any problems with people nicking my own pics as I do not make my living from this and it can even be considered a form of compliment of someone likes them so much they would bother to nick them. However, when it comes to other photographers, I shall put a note about copyright on my page and I believe there is already a note under each of the pictures that are not mine to say who the photographer is and that should, hopefully, satisfy the photographers concerned. If not, they can contact me and we can come to an arrangement - I do have their agreement to post the pictures on my website so I do not anticipate any issues arising.

Thanks Andy for the references re Flash and also about .htaccess files.

I think I shall keep my website reasonably free of Flash as there is no need to include animation at the moment. Thanks for taking the trouble to post a reply.