Protect Your Website From Image Theft [5+ Simple Tips]

I’m sure if you are running a website or a blog then you will have plenty of images there. Images are a vital part of your content; it adds more value to it. Sometimes we use Stock Images on our website, but people who are into more professional content creation will create their own images and stuff.

They shoot photographs using their camera, do some Photoshop work, add some graphic effects, but at the end, someone else using that image and getting the credit? Should we allow that? Nope.

It should be noted that we can’t prevent image theft easily, because, there are plenty of people on the internet who have no idea about ‘Stealing Images is a Crime’ thing. They simply download the images from random websites and use that for their own purposes. In this article, we have shared some basic tips to protect your website from image theft. I would like to quote this ‘Prevention is better than Cure’ proverb here, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

Protect Your Website From Image Theft

1. Disable Right Click

This is the first and basic tip I would recommend. You can disable right click on your blog posts and articles, by this, you can prevent some people from easily copying/saving your images. They usually right-click the image and go to ‘Save Picture’ option to grab your images. You can avoid all this by simply disabling the right click option.

If you look at the above image, you can see the kind of options you have when you right-click on an image online. So if you are serious about protecting your images on your website, then this is a good option. If you are running a WordPress blog, then you can use this plugin for disabling Right click on all the pages.

2. Adding Watermarks

If I’m creating an image, say a meme or any other informational image, I’ll surely add a watermark to that. I spend hours on doing something, and I don’t want someone else to claim ownership. I hope you might also feel the same. I use Photoshop to edit the images and at the end, I make sure I add our logo as a watermark, somewhere in the image, most probably corners.

You can check out this picture we did for HBB; we added our blog’s logo at the top-left corner. It helps us to tell the audience that we created this image and also to avoid some people from claiming ownership to this image.

3. Using Smart Screenshots

Every time I take a screenshot I make sure to check properly whether I can add our blog’s name or URL somewhere. You can take a look at the image below, instead of using some other website, we used our very own blog URL. This is something basic, and I’m sure you can apply this on other screenshots you take.

4. Disable Hotlinking

There are two types of people: 1) One who steals just the image. 2) One who steals both the image and the URL.

Haha. Yes, this is what Hotlinking is about. Some folks, they use our images on their sites by keeping our image URL itself. This affects our website’s server bandwidth and usage as well. You can use the code mentioned below on your website’s .htaccess file to disable hotlinking.

Don’t forget to replace ‘example.com’ with your own domain name. You can also create and keep a custom image (no-hotlinking.jpg) to make them aware about ‘hotlink’ stealing. This image will be displayed there instead of the copied images.

5. Have Copyright Policy

Each and every website/blog should have a Copyright Policy, it’s an official statement to prevent people from doing such thefts. I’m not sure whether anyone will read your copyright policy before stealing the images, but trust me, this policy is helpful when you are filing a complaint or emailing anyone regarding this. Be professional to move such things ahead. You can keep this policy link on your website’s footer section so that this appears on every page.

6. Use Reverse Image Search

I’m a big fan of this tool; I have been using this for various purposes apart from ‘image theft’ purpose. If you have a particular image on your blog, and you want to know whether someone copied/used it on their blogs, then you can use this awesome tool from Google. Go to Google Images, click the ‘Camera’ icon and here you will find two options.

You can either paste the image URL, or you can directly upload the image, and then you can search whether this specific image is present on any other websites on the Internet. Pretty useful to search and know how widely your image has been copied. You can then personally message the webmasters to take down the image, or ask them to give proper image credit perhaps.

7. Use DMCA

Last but not least, DMCA comes very handily here. You can sign up for DMCA if you are serious about your website’s content. You get access to unlimited plagiarism scanning and image watermarking. I have personally done some DMCA Takedowns, and they were really effective.

These are some of the easy and must implement tips if you want to protect the images on your website or your blog, do kindly let us know in the comments below if you have any other essential tips to prevent image theft.