Watermarks and Copy Protection: What Actually Works

A published image cannot be fully protected: what is shown on a screen can be captured from a screen. The realistic aim is not to make copying impossible but to make it inconvenient and traceable.

The visible mark

A caption or logo over the image. The simplest and most effective measure against lazy copying. The trade-off is obvious: the more noticeable the mark, the worse the work looks, while a translucent signature in a corner is removed in a minute.

A sensible compromise is to place the mark where it crosses a significant part of the frame rather than in a corner. Removal then requires repainting rather than cropping.

The invisible mark

Information woven into the image itself, unseen by the eye but extractable by software. It survives recompression, cropping and screenshotting, does not interfere with viewing, and lets you prove a file's origin.

A separate technique is an individual mark for each recipient. If material leaks, the mark shows whose copy travelled.

Metadata

Author information inside the file. Useful for order, useless as protection: removed with one command and stripped by most platforms on upload.

Technical measures on a site

• Disabling right-click — bypassed in seconds and irritates visitors
• Splitting an image into fragments — complicates saving, breaks indexing
• Showing reduced versions with full size behind a subscription — works
• Access by link with an expiry — works

The sober conclusion

Protection makes sense against mass automated copying and against casual pilfering. Against someone determined to take your material, nothing helps except one decision: do not publish what you cannot afford to have leak.

This material is intended for adults over 18 and is informational in nature.