Q. I am a professional photographer, and I want to set up a Web site for a photo gallery. I need to find the best way to protect my photos from being used without my permission. What about watermarking? Also, can you suggest a Web host for photo galleries?
A. The Internet can bring new threats to professional photographers. It's easy to copy and use online images without permission. There's no foolproof way to prevent people from taking your online photos. Once your photos are in a Web browser, they're already delivered.
However, you can certainly make theft inconvenient.
For instance, you can insert some JavaScript code into your pages' <head> tags. The code gets rid of the potential thief's right-click menu. That menu is needed to save the image alone. This can be overcome if thieves disable JavaScript in their browsers. But most people don't know that.
If you use cascading style sheets (CSS), you can do even better. Using layers, you can position a transparent GIF over each of your photos. Downloaders attempting to get your photos will instead get the transparent GIF. Thieves will copy pictures of literally nothing.
You could also use a table full of transparent GIF pictures. Then slip your photos beneath them using the "background" attribute of each <td> tag. This will provide the same protection as the CSS layering. But both take more skill than the JavaScript.
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