Is there a means that allows members to upload images in posts, but to prevent those images from being downloaded by other members?
Thanks kindly,
Ross
What’s the use case?
Could they make the posts PMs?
We are a camera club and take intellectual property seriously. We invite our members to share images, either simply for pleasure or for coaching. We would prefer that even though the site is private and the only way to join is by invitation, to prevent members from right clicking on an image in a post and downloading it to their computers.
Because we want all members to see the postings, PMs don’t fit the requirements.
What’s to stop anyone from pressing the screenshot button on their device to copy the photos?
That said, although it is a bit of protection theater more than real protection, I am not opposed to a theme component here which disables the right click action on images cc @Johani
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Hey Jeff, excellent point. The difference between a downloaded image and a screenshot is going to be related to size and resolution. Our members will be posting larger images at higher resolution with the EXIF data intact. A screenshot will surely grab the image, but only at web screen resolution which is never going to make a decent print. Downloading the member’s image could provide a print ready image and even though I trust our members (it’s in our terms and conditions about using the work of others), some of my early adopter group are asking the question. Cheers!
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If the user is tech-savvy, there is literally no way to stop them from downloading the image via their browser controls, to be clear. So you’d only be “stopping” people who were casual computer users.
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If someone can see the image in their web browser there is nothing that can stop them from saving the image locally.
Photographers need to know that. If they want to protect their images, they should do it with watermarks. If you really want to protect them you could have a plugin developed that would watermark all images with the forum name and maybe the username too.
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Unless the photographers transfer the rights to the forum they need to take responsibility to watermark their images prior to uploading. Otherwise when said watermarking is defeated it’s easy to shift blame onto the site owners.
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And why would you let them do that if no one is supposed to see that data? Either put in place a file-size limit that forces the user to web-optimize before uploading, or have a background task run through uploads, and process them to web specs. Keep only the webified files.
If you don’t want anyone to save the full-size file, you don’t want the overhead of having it loaded for everyone who views the forum thread either.
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Thank you all for the input. Discourse is working as needed for our club. If there is no native method to prevent users from downloading images that other users post I will update our terms of use policy.
This topic can now be closed.
Hello, can you add watermark feauter for thumnail or all of photos on a topic?
Thank you!
Watermarks are great for selling photos.
But you cannot judge a photo that has a watermark.
We disolay photos in our forum in order to get opinions and ideas to imorive them. If they have a watermark it interferes with image visualization.
There is no way to stop a techy user to get a copy from screen But ut is better to put as much difgicults as possible.
I don’t think the above statement is remotely true. Watermarks are how most agencies and photo studios present previews of shots to customers when they’re selling reproduction rights or ordering prints.
If the watermarks prevented customers from deciding what they wanted, or reduced sales, they would be using a different approach such as RMS.
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Of course, I have said that: watermarks are the best way to sell images.
But we are not selling images, we are a forum of photography, and we show our images in order to get opinions about them and receive critics.
You won’t see any art gallery were day will display your arte with a watermark over it.
you will not find any jury of a contest that admits images with a watermark.
Any way if you upload an image to a photogrophy forum with a watermark to get opinions all you would receive is “Watermark spoils image” or “I cannot judge image quality with that watermark” or “watermark is too distracted”.
You receive that with just signatures on the image if they are too evident.
So watermarks are not an option for us.
May be an excellent way of protect your image (not so good if they are not stron enough, you can easily remove a tranparente watermark, or delete if if it is in a corner).
Seems like a reasonable solution?
Resize/recompress to a manner that is still satisfactory for the web experience of your visitors and community members, but not as high as print quality?
Wait a sec here …
Doesn’t max image megapixels site setting now 100% resolve the OP.
If you don’t want people stealing images for print, just reduce the megapixels here to something that is not printable. Turning this thing down to 2 megapixels would still have “ok-ish” looking images for the web but totally unprintable.
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It depends on what you call usable for the web.
For us, something less than 1900 pixels in the large side is scarce for judging image quality.
You are assuming that people steal photos for printing them and it is not usually the case.
Most are used in blogs or even in new papers ot news channels.
The most effective way to protect your photo us using a clearly visible watermark that extends through most part of your photo.
It is not a solution for a forum about photography.
Making it more dificult to download the photo us not a solution, but helps.
The problem with the given code is that it prevents using right click mouse button every where, it would be great to prevent it just when you click over an image.
This is an edge case. To take protect images from download you’ll need to store them on a server specifically designed for that, perhaps allowing discourse access to a low quality image for discussion and to get the full image you’d click to the other site (which might use discourse as the SSO server) which could conceivably somehow keep people from downloading images. It’s a difficult thing to do even for a dedicated web app.
If that is really what you are after I think the best path forward is to commission a plugin on marketplace
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We don’t need dedicated servers nor special image processing.
Indeed we prefer the server not to process images at all, is the mision if the photographer to prepare them as he likes.
We have been running for 17 years with no need for that.
It is the yser choice to decide which is the size if the image he is decided to upload and take the risk it may be stolen.
We just prefer making image download not evident, as flickr, 500px and other sites fir image sharing do.