Preventing Image Theft

To my mind people are often a little overly concerned about preventing image theft from their websites. People are always going to do it, and it certainly isn't ideal, but the real question to ask is, 'are you losing any money by it?' If you are not going to lose any money and a few predatory image theives aren't going to cost you any money, then you probably have more important things to worry about.

Traditional Javasript solutions for preventing website visitors taking images using right-mouse click are generally awful, and create a really unprofessional feel when you click your right mouse button and get a popup telling you this is not allowed. I really don't like these things. Moreover, preventing right mouse click does not always prevent image theft because the visitor can still acquire the image using FILE > SAVE AS.

Instead I would suggest a really simple alternative that will help a little with getting link juice flowing around your site, and deter at least some image theft. Link your images to other relevant web pages on your website. Wrapping your image in a hyperlink will mean that in Mozilla Firefox at least, right clicking on the image will offer the option to save the link, but not the image. This will not work in Safari, Opera or IE, but at least it affords a little protection, is better than preventing right-mouse-click with Javascript and has a little bit of SEO benefit. Its a compromise, but to my mind a worthwhile one.