Comments on: Minimal Protection for Images

By: Austringer

Austringer — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:39:47 +0000

You can get "jhead" here. There is a source tarball plus pre-built binaries for Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:24:16 +0000

What’s an authoritative download source for jhead?
Is it in Perl or does it need compilation?

By: Austringer

Austringer — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:34:28 +0000

I agree that use of the JPEG comment capability is easily sidestepped, but a large class of casual infringers likely don’t even know that such a property exists.

The images I post here are typically sized to just fit in my theme, and so are 560 pixels on the long dimension. That would be suitable for printing to perhaps 2 or 3 inches on the long side. However, the CafePress infringer simply based a silhouette on such an image, and applied that to the creation of about 70 different products. Much smaller than that size, though, and one is talking about small screen sizes, too.

I really dislike using proprietary things like Flash for distribution. My preference for web communication aims closer to lowest common denominator.

ImageMagick provides a means to watermark images, making it easy to script watermarking over 90,000 images.

Thanks for the comment and ideas. I hope you continue to find things here of interest.

By: Roe

Roe — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:25:23 +0000

Not saying I would steal your images, but if you can write a perl script to add that text than I can write one to remove your text. There are only 3 psuedo-solutions to this problem:

Use images small enough that people wont try to use them for derivative works.

Use flash to display your images, if you know perl then you could figure out flash, I personally like Slideshow Pro.

Use photoshop or the like to put a visible watermark on your images.

Good luck and I do enjoy your blog and photos, though I enjoy them without piracy.