Member Avatar for Pauline Lomax

I am trying to find out code or way of making sure noone can right click and save images on the website..there must be a way..I am working on Dreamweaver - so I am not very code literate...any suggestions??

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As correctly points out, there is no 100% way to stop someone from copying an image they can see in their browser: screenshots, browser caches and developer tools will always let a determined user capture pixels. That said, most sites aim to deter casual copying rather than to make it impossible. 's suggestion to use smaller, lower-resolution previews is a good start.

Practical, Dreamweaver-friendly steps that give real protection without breaking the user experience: bake a visible watermark into any public image and publish only web-optimized previews (for example, max ~800px wide and medium JPEG quality). Keep originals offline or deliver high‑res files only after purchase or login. Avoid client-side “no right click” tricks — they are easy to bypass and create accessibility problems.

To stop casual hotlinking at the server level, add a referer-check rule (Apache/mod_rewrite) in your site root. Example .htaccess snippet:

# block basic hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https?://(www\.)?example\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|png|gif)$ - [F,NC]

Replace example.com with your domain. Note: referer-based blocking is effective against casual hotlinkers but can be spoofed; some hosts use Nginx (different config) or ignore .htaccess—ask hosting support if it has no effect.

For commercial assets, combine approaches: visible watermark + low-res public preview + gated delivery (authenticated gallery or signed/expiring URLs via a CDN/S3) for buyers. Troubleshooting tips: if images still hotlink, confirm mod_rewrite is enabled, check file permissions, and test with curl specifying different referer headers. For , the fastest Dreamweaver workflow is: export watermarked previews, update pages, upload, and ask the host to enable hotlink protection. This balances protection, accessibility, and site appearance.

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Member Avatar for samaru

I am trying to find out code or way of making sure noone can right click and save images on the website..there must be a way..I am working on Dreamweaver - so I am not very code literate...any suggestions??

Are you trying to protect the images from your web site? It's impossible. Whatever trick you try to pull, as long as I can see it, I can take a screenshot of the entire window, crop it in a graphics program, and then I have it.

If you're trying to avoid hotlinking (so others don't use the images off your server and drain your bandwidth), then configure your web server to do so. Just tell us the server you use.

If you want to give the user a hard time saving the images by right clicking and saving, use the methods from this URL. Keep in mind though that experienced web designers/developers/power users, know how to get around these. They also know about the screen capture method:

Other ways include having a Flash file that displays the image or using some sort of server script to display the image. The server script could point to the image, and in your <img> tag, you would have the path to the server script page, not the image's path. So it would look something like this:

<img src="someimage.php?id=323">

That way, a person wouldn't know the path to the image to hotlink. Also, try avoiding the JavaScript "No Right Click" option. It doesn't look professional and could annoy others if they're trying to use other options when they right click, like copy and saving a piece of text.

Member Avatar for hangin321

Yep thats all true. There is no way of preventing someone from grabbing images from any website - just ways to make it more difficult for them. If you're trying to display copyrighted images, your best bet is to display small low resolution copies so that someone won't be able to enlarge them and print them off.

Member Avatar for Pauline Lomax

Are you trying to protect the images from your web site? It's impossible. Whatever trick you try to pull, as long as I can see it, I can take a screenshot of the entire window, crop it in a graphics program, and then I have it.

If you're trying to avoid hotlinking (so others don't use the images off your server and drain your bandwidth), then configure your web server to do so. Just tell us the server you use.

If you want to give the user a hard time saving the images by right clicking and saving, use the methods from this URL. Keep in mind though that experienced web designers/developers/power users, know how to get around these. They also know about the screen capture method:

Other ways include having a Flash file that displays the image or using some sort of server script to display the image. The server script could point to the image, and in your <img> tag, you would have the path to the server script page, not the image's path. So it would look something like this:

<img src="someimage.php?id=323">

That way, a person wouldn't know the path to the image to hotlink. Also, try avoiding the JavaScript "No Right Click" option. It doesn't look professional and could annoy others if they're trying to use other options when they right click, like copy and saving a piece of text.

Thanks for the help - I will certainly check out the scripts - I don't feel confident about flash - haven't looked at and I don't think I would know where to start...

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