Image Protection: 5 Ways to Prevent Image Theft in WordPress

May 12th, 2017 | by Ravi Chahar || Leave a comment |

While running a WordPress blog, you may be worried about the content including the images. Do you know the ways to protect image theft in WordPress?

You may not notice but many people are there who can pick the images from your blog and use on their own.

It’s always recommended to protect your images. You may have heard about many times how people copy the content.

Well, the content itself consists the images. The visual content is at its verge where people are more likely to read such content.

In this article, you will learn different ways to prevent image theft in WordPress.

What is Image Theft and Why Should You be Worried About it

As mentioned above, there are many people who steal images and use on their website. People think no one would notice such things.

Though it’s hard to find out between millions of websites but somehow the trackbacks and pings can alert the content owner.

People should assume that the images they’re going to steal are copyright protected. Which means it’s unethical to copy those images without permission.

The copyright law is global. It’s the same for everyone in the whole world.

It’s believed that there is no certain law to stop people but there are a few ways to prevent image theft in WordPress.

You can discourage people to copy.

#1. Watermark Your Images

Most of the website owners watermark their images with the logo of their website. It’s one of the best ways to discourage people from copying your images.

It’s because if they use any image on their website, the logo of your website will also appear.

You can either add it manually while creating the images or you can use a plugin. Install and activate Image Watermark plugin.

Go to Settings>>Watermark and you will see the different options to add watermark. You can upload an image and use it.

You can also add an option to the WordPress media library to add watermark to all the images you upload. Depending on your choice, you can select the options.

#2. Disable Right Click

You may have seen at many websites where you can’t right click on any type of the content. It includes the text, images, videos etc.

Whenever you will try to right click, an alert message will appear or nothing will happen. You can also disable it on your WordPress blog.

Install and activate Image Watermark plugin. Though this plugin is used to watermark the images but it has also a feature to disable right click.

Go to Settings>>Watermark and you can easily see the “Image Protection” section to check the box to disable right click.

Save the settings and you’re done. No one will able to right-click and save the images from your website.

#3. Disable Hotlinking of Images

This is the worst thing anyone can do. Image hotlinking means someone copies the images along with the original URL of those images.

It means whenever someone visits his/her website, those images will get loaded from your server.

It will consume your bandwidth. If done for many images, it will slow down your website. All of your ways to boost your WordPress website speed wouldn’t work.

You can prevent image hotlinking in WordPress by adding a few lines of the code in the .htaccess file. For which, you should know how to edit the .htaccess file.

And if you’re using All In One Security Plugin then you can also enable the content protection from its settings.

#4. Add DMCA badge to Your Website

DMCA is a copyright firm which helps people to protect their content by adding the DMCA badge. If someone copies, you can file a copyright complaint against him/her.

DMCA will send a notice to that person to remove the duplicate content. If not then the website will be put down by their web hosting.

To accomplish this, you just have to submit your website to DMCA website and they will provide you a badge to add on your website.

They will monitor your content for around one month and after that, no one would be able to copy anything. An alert message would appear even someone would try to select the content.

This is one of the best ways to prevent image theft in WordPress.

#5. Adding Copyright in your Website’s Footer

You may have noticed that in ever website’s footer, there is a line showing the copyright along with the year. You should know how to add copyright in WordPress theme.

It automatically means the content present on the website is copyrighted to this website only. No one is allowed to copy any time of the content.

Though most of the people ignore it but still, you can complain about the content which has been stolen from your website.

It’s simple, you can show the proof that the content was created by you and everything will be taken care of.

It can be added using a simple code. Most of the WordPress themes have an inbuilt feature which allows its users to add anything in the footer.

Let me show an example of the code.

It’s the simple HTML. Anyone can edit this. Replace the name and the time duration accordingly. Using HTML code, you have to update it every year.

You can also add dynamic copyright year in WordPress theme which will keep changing automatically.

These Ways to Prevent Image Theft in WordPress Can Help You

Sometimes it feels great that someone is copying your content but it can have some negative impacts.

Google isn’t that much smart to recognize the original content on its own. Sometimes, you have to let it know by filing a complaint.

But if you can use these ways to prevent image theft in WordPress then you wouldn’t need to worry about anything. People wouldn’t able even to steal anything. If you have any doubt, feel free to clear it.

You can also connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.