The sad truth about being a graphic designer, photographer or a blogger is that there are plenty of people who are constantly ripping off your content. People may modify your images and display them on their websites, without giving you any attribution. Stealing visual or textual content directly off your website is the most common method of content and image theft. Here are a few methods that can help you protect against that.

Preventing Image Theft

Image Copyright laws are universal and apply to everyone who uses the internet. If you create a design or photo, you're are the creator of your work by default, even if you forgot to mention it on their website.

When someone tries to steal the creator's work, it's not only unethical but illegal, too.

All types of images, like photographs, graphics, cartoons, drawings, are considered artwork. According to international laws, only the creator can permit to reprint their work and its usage. Most people think that if it is available online, it is usable anywhere they like, but that's not true at all.

There are many places where one can find public or free images. While it is flattering to see other people use your work, it can be annoying to see the blatant disregard for your rights. Not many people know how to stop this stealing progress completely. But there are few ways to prevent images and discourage your image-thieves.

1. Disable the Right Click Option

We all know how to copy something. Just right click the mouse and select ‘save image as.' The next thing you'll see is the copied image in your download folder. When you disable the right click option on your image, it makes it difficult for an average user to copy your artwork.

How to do it?

There are plugins that you can use on your website to disable the right click option.

Envira Gallery Lite

It is the best and one of the most used WordPress plugin to keep your images safe. Not only does it help you create beautiful image galleries but it also supports image protection. Activate the plugin by going to Envira gallery Lite “settings” and click on the Add-ons tab. After that, scroll down to find ‘Protection Act”. Click and save it. Create image gallery with the plugin and select the available option of “Enable image protection.” It will disable the right click option on your images.

No Right Click Images Plugin

No Right Click Images Plugin restricts people from using your words without your permission. It uses JavaScript and CSS techniques to protect your home page and posts. Some of its built-in features are:

• No right-click or context menu
• Show alert message, HTML Ad or Image Ad on save images or right click
• Disable the following keys CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+X, CTRL+S or CTRL+V
• Advanced and easy to use control panel

Important: Disabling right click is the not the recommended way to do it. By doing that you disable a lot more than just ability to copy images. You disable users usual way to navigate back and forward, print or copy text for reference and so on. You effectively get your visitors to become angry at you or think that your site is broken.

2. Create Galleries

Uploading images one by one on your website could be tedious work. Creating galleries is a lot easier. After creating the gallery, note down the HTML code that allows you to include the gallery in any creator's work. Even after a gallery is uploaded on your website, you can continue adding photos to it.

How to do it?

NextGEN Gallery

NextGen Gallery is a plugin that streamlines the process of creating a gallery. It confers you with extra options like the slideshow, lightbox, adding images, uploading entire zip files, etc. It is compatible with any theme which makes it the most used plugin for creating galleries.

3. Use Watermarks on Images

Watermarking is a process of keeping your digital information out of sight in a carrier signal. It works perfectly on many stock photography WordPress websites. It helps you in detecting the source of illegally copied images.

How to do it?

Envira Gallery Plugins

There are just plenty of uses of adding Envira Gallery plugin into your website. Adding this plugin gives you Watermarking as an add-on, but you need a silver license to use it. Once you have obtained the silver license, go to settings of your Envira Gallery and click on the ‘add-ons' tab. Find Watermarking among the tabs. Click on it and install on your website.

4. Include Copyright Notices

Adding a copyright notice doesn't do much but helps to scare people to use your artwork. It will show a notice that stealing pictures could lead to a serious offense. Doing this will discourage people to steal and use your art.

How to do it?

You can add a copyright notice in a footer file by adding an HTML like this and need to update it every New Year:

<p>© 2009-2016 dreamgrow.com</p>

5. Add a DMCA Badge to Your Site

The DMCA offers both free and paid protection for your site. If they find someone using your images without your consent, the person will get threatening legal actions on your behalf. It is an automatic process and usually includes scares infringes into taking your pictures right away. A DMCA badge added on your website acts as a hindrance for content or image thieves.

You can find a DMCA plugin in your WordPress account. Just install it, and it will automatically insert badges on your web page.

Preventing Content Theft

Many people are copying content from a website and adding it to theirs without giving any credit to the original post.

A person is only allowed to use the headlines or excerpts from your text but not the whole content. If someone steals the complete article without your permission, the concern for content theft arises. There are following plugins that you can use to prevent that from happening:

1. Feed Delay

When you publish a post, a robot will scrape it without any attribution link and indexes it before you do. The search engines will see your post as a duplicate. Hence, they keep your page below the ranking of your content thief's blog.

Isn't this is embarrassing and disheartening?

Feed delay is something that saves you from this. It delayes the posts from getting added to RSS for preferred amount of time. You can adjust the timing which will help your content to get indexed.

2. Tynt Insight

By using Tynt Insight plugin, you can get a notification when your content or images are getting copied. You can set this plugin up by adding a snippet code on your website.

3. WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast SEO plugin offers you an RSS menu that allows you to include content directly below and above every post. You can add any content to it. But if you need to add an attribution link to the RSS feed, you're given a special link. The moment your stolen content republishes, it'll provide a link to your post and readers will know who the original author is.

4. WP Content Copy Protection

As stated in image theft, by disabling the right click on a page one can stop the content from getting copied. The same can be done to prevent content theft from your website by using WP Content Copy Protection plugin. It'll disable image drag and drop, right click and various keyboard commands.

5. Plagiarism Checkers

You can find various plagiarism checkers online such as Grammarly and others. Use them to check your text against any possible plagiarism.

While Grammarly is an excellent tool, Copyscape is more popular as it can check an entire URL for plagiarism. If you are using Copyscape, it lets you add a “Protected By Copyscape” notice on your website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MggxboD44aM

Final Warnings

Be careful out there as there are content and image thieves that are lethargic enough to steal your content. You can use above plugins to avoid content theft and publish your artwork with a peace of mind.

We hope this article will help you. If you know some other good tools or tips, do let us know, so that our readers will also know thanks to your valuable comments.

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Photo Credit: Visual Hunt