Image protection - copy secure gif jpg bmp images on your website

Image Guardian - the tool for enhanced Image Protection

Image Guardian is an add-on to HTML Guardian for enhanced protection of the images in your web site.

HTML Guardian can protect your entire website, with one exception - it can not fully protect images. HTML Guardian can do a lot to make the image theft much harder. If you choose to disable the right click in the encrypted file, visitors will not be able to right click and select 'Save image..' from the context menu (this will also disable the IE6 Image Toolbar). If you choose 'Save As' from the 'File' menu in Internet explorer, it will save the html file and all images and other files referenced in it. But if the file is encrypted, images and other external files will not be saved.

However, when someone browses your site all images included in html files are first downloaded and then displayed. So all your images are somewhere on visitor's hard drive and someone can find them, although that's not so easy and most internet users don't know how to do it.
But a knowledgeable person can steal all your images.

Here comes the Image Guardian - it will split your images into pieces and will generate the appropriate code (which will be then encrypted by HTML Guardian) to display those pieces in your pages as if this is an integral, non-splitted image.
This will make image theft nearly impossible - if someone wants to get some of your images, he/she will not be able to get the entire image, only a pieces of it saved under random, meaningless names. It will be very hard to determine that a certain piece is a part of a certain image. Let's say your website has 10 images, and you configured Image Guardian to split them into 3x3=9 pieces each - this will result in 90 image pieces with random names, mixed with a lot of images from other websites visited. A determined person may still be able to find all the pieces of a certain image, but finding them and joining them together to recreate the original image file will require a lot of time, knowledge and expensive image editing applications (like Photoshop and similar). In most cases, this will also lead to a seriously decreased image quality. We can say that HTML Guardian's image protection will decrease the risk of image theft with 95-98% (but not 100%).

Let's summarize the main benefits of Image Guardian:

- image theft will be nearly impossible

- direct linking to your images from another websites (something very common) will be absolutely impossible

- big images will load faster if split

- the code that loads the image will be encrypted using the award winning HTML Guardian code protection technology

Image Guardian is fully functional only in HTML Guardian Enterprise edition.

In HTML Guardian Personal and Professional editions, Image Guardian will protect images exactly the same way as the Enterprise edition, but a green 'protware.com' watermark will appear on each protected image. There will be no watermark when the Enterprise edition is used.
So testing the Image Guardian with HTML Guardian Personal and HTML Guardian Professional Edition is possible.
A complete comparison between HTML Guardian Personal, Professional and Enterprise editions you can see here.

Note that Image Guardian will not protect just any image used in your website, there are certain limitations. Please read carefully the Image Guardian section of HTML Guardian's Help file for a detailed explanation. There you will also find information about all the Image Guardian configuration settings, generation and usage of encrypted script loaders for protected images etc.

Image Guardian FAQ

Q: How to purchase Image Guardian?
A: You can't purchase Image Guardian standalone, it's an integral part of HTML Guardian.
To use the Image Guardian, you have to purchase HTML Guardian Enterprise Edition.
In HTML Guardian Personal and Professional Edition the Image Guardian is available as well, but its functionality is limited and it is suitable mainly for testing purposes.

Q: My images are not protected. What's the problem?
A: Please read carefully the Image Guardian section of HTML Guardian's Help file, where all Image Guardian limitations and most of the problems you may have are explained in details.
Note that Image Guardian functionality is limited in HTML Guardian Personal Edition and HTML Guardian Professional Edition. Image Guardian is fully functional only in HTML Guardian Enterprise Edition. However the image protection functionality available in Personal & Professional editions is enough for testing purposes.
A complete comparison between HTML Guardian Personal, Professional and Enterprise editions is available here.

Q: I have the same image included in many files. If I use the random names option, will Image Guardian split this image into different pieces each time?
A: No. Image Guardian remembers the images protected in the current session, it will not generate new image pieces for an image that was already protected in the current session (after HTML Guardian was started) - it will use the existing, already generated pieces, and the same encrypted code to display the protected image. But if you use the same image in let's say two files, you encrypt the first file, then you restart HTML Guardian and encrypt the second file, Image Guardian will generate new image pieces.
That's why it's recommended to encrypt all files of your site at once if you are using the image protection - this way you will avoid protecting some image several times.