How to prevent downloading images and video files from my website

Question

How to prevent downloading images and video files from my website  Is it possible  What would be the best way to do this

User · Answer

If you want only authorised users to get the content, both the client and the server need to use encryption.

For video and audio, a good solution is Azure Media Services, which has content protection and encryption. You embed the Azure media player in your browser and it streams the video from Azure.

For documents and email, you can look at Azure Rights Management, which uses a special client. It doesn't currently work in ordinary web browsers, unfortunately, except for one-off, single-use codes.

I'm not sure exactly how secure all this is, however. As others have pointed out, from a security point of view, once those downloaded bytes are in the "attacker's" RAM, they're as good as gone. No solution is 100% secure in this case (please correct me if I'm wrong). As with most security, the goal is to make it harder, so the 99% don't bother.

User · Answer

Put your image or video in flash format  Works great

User · Answer

As soon as they view your page that includes the picture or video  the item is downloaded into the temporary folder of their browser   So if you don t want it downloaded  don t post it

User · Answer

It also doesn t hurt to watermark your images with Photoshop or even in Lightroom 3 now   Make sure the watermark is clear and in a conspicuous place on your image  That way if it s downloaded  at least you get the advertising

User · Answer

Put the content on google drive and make it download protect  This way people can only see your documents  pictures but cannot download it

User · Answer

In standard HTML  I don t know of anyway   You didn t really say  but I m guessing you are having problems with people deep linking into your content   If that s the case  and you are open to server side code  I believe this might work    Create a page that accepts a numeric id  maps it to a server file path  opens that file  writes the binary directly to the response stream  On the page request  generate a bunch of random ids  and map them to the actual media urls  and store that mapping object server side somewhere  in session   with a limited life  Render your pages with your media links pointing to the new media page with the appropriate id as a query string argument  Clear the mapping object and generate  all new links on every postback    This     won t stop people from downloading from within your page  definitely isn t as lightweight as standard HTML  and has it s own set of issues    But it s a general outline of a workable process which might help you prevent users from deep linking

User · Answer

Granted that any image the user can see will be able to be saved on the computer and there is nothing you can do about it  Now if you want to block access to other images that the user is not supposed to see  I am actually doing it that way    Every link is to the  src  in your image tag is in fact a request send to a controller on the server    the server checks the access rights of that specific user  and returns the image if the user is supposed to have access to it   all images are stored in a directory that is not directly accessible from the browser    Benefit     The user will not have access to anything that you don t intent him her to have access to   Drawback    Those requests are slow   especially is there are lots of images on the same page  I haven t found a good way to accelerate that in fact

User · Answer

I d like to add a more philosophical comment   The whole intent of the internet  particularly the World Wide Web  is to share data   If you don t want people to download a picture video document  don t put it on the web   It s really that simple   Too many people think they can impose their own rules on an existing design   Those who want to post content on the web  and control its distribution  are looking to have their cake and eat it too

User · Answer

This is how I do it in case anyone in the future is wondering   I put this in the  htaccess file on the root server   RewriteEngine on  RewriteCond   HTTP REFERER    http    www    domain com   NC   RewriteCond   HTTP REFERER    http    www    domain com     NC  RewriteRule    mp4 avi   -  F    This stops them from say going to domain com videos myVid mp4 and then saving it from there

User · Answer

No it s not  You may block right-clicks and simillar stuff but if someone wants to download it  he will do so  trust me

User · Answer

I think the best way is to prevent right clicking on your webpage  because that is the most convenient way a normal user try to download the content  and you can consider it as remark if u able to do this only as you are never gonna be able to stop a computer geek or hacker people from downloading it  because once the content is on the internet  it means it is in the public domain already

User · Answer

If you are using PHP  the best way is to control it the  htaccess  you need to put your files  images and videos under consideration in a separate folder directory  and create a new   htaccess file in this directory with the below    RewriteEngine On RewriteCond   REQUEST URI     mp4 mp3 avi    NC  RewriteCond   HTTP REFERER    http   sample com      NC  RewriteRule     -  F L    The first line   REQUEST URI  will prevent getting the file through the web browser or through curl  The second line   HTTP REFERER  will prevent accessing the image video using HTML tags  lt img gt  or  lt video gt  from any website except the exception   you provide instead of http   sample com  which usually should be your website itself    You can also have a look at my question and the accepted answer here for more tricks on the browser side

User · Answer

As many have said  you can t stop someone from downloading content  You just can t   But you can make it harder   You can overlay images with a transparent div  which will prevent people from right clicking on them  or  setting the background of a div to the image will have the same effect    If you re worried about cross-linking  ie  other people linking to your images  you can check the HTTP referrer and redirect requests which come from a domain which isn t yours to  something else

User · Answer

you can reduce the possibility but not eliminate it

User · Answer

You can mark folders or files so that they don t have read access  any of the main web servers support this    This allows you to store them on the server without any level of access to the outside world   You may want to do this if you have a service that generates images for someone else to download later  or if you use your web account for FTP access  but don t want anyone to view the files    i e  upload a  bak file to the server for someone else to FTP down again    However  as others have said  getting into copyright areas where people can view the image or video but not save them locally is not fully possibly  although there are tools to discourage illegal usage

User · Answer

Don t post them to your site   Otherwise it is not possible

User · Answer

Images must be downloaded in order to be viewed by the client  Videos are a similar case  in many scenarios  You can setup proxy scripts to serve the files out  but that doesn t really solve the issue of preventing the user from getting their own copy  For a more thorough discussion of this topic  see the question How can I prevent make it hard to download my flash video

User · Answer

You can set the image to be background image and have a transparent foreground image

User · Answer

You can t stop image video theft but you can make harder for normal users but you can t make it harder for the programmers like us  I mean thieves that know little web programming    There are some tricks you can try   1   Using flash as YouTube and many others sites like http   www funnenjoy com does   2   Div overlaping or background pic setting  but users with little sense can easily save all resources by opening inspect element or other developer option    3   You can disable right click and specific keys like CTRL   S and others possibles with JavaScript but main drawback is that if user disable JavaScript our all tricks fail down   4   Save image in none online directories  if you have full access to web server  and read that files with server side languages like PHP every time when image   video is required and change image id time to time or create script that can automatically change ID after every access   5   Use  htaccess in apache to prevent linking of your images by others sites  you can use this site to automatically generate  htacess http   www htaccesstools com hotlink-protection

User · Answer

This is an old post  but for video you might want to consider using MPEG-DASH to obfuscate your files  Plus  it will provide a better streaming experience for your users without the need for a separate streaming server  More info in this post  How to disable video audio downloading in web pages

User · Answer

Insert a transparent gif 1px x 1px just inside the  lt body gt  tag    lt body gt  lt img src  route-to-images blim gif  class  blimover  gt    Then style it with this    blimover     width  100   important    height  100   important    z-index  1000  important    position  absolute  important    top  0  important    left  0  important      This will remove any click functionality from a page  but it sure stops people stealing any content   You can apply the same to a  lt div gt    lt section gt    lt article gt  etc  just name accordingly and prevent your copy and or images being ripped   Nothing stops a screengrab though

User · Answer

I think the best way is  STREAM THE VIDEO IN SEPARATED ENCRYPTED PARTS   There are video hosting services such as vzaar that have this functionality  As far as I know  that will make it really hard to download directly  At least for 95  of the people   But of course  if the video plays on the screen people can just use a screen recorder and some simple software to record sound from the audio output  but he she will have to play the ENTIRE thing to save it  totally inconvenient

User · Answer

As the browser needs to transfer the content to display it  text  images  videos   the data is already on the client s computer when the website is displayed  The previous answers give little advice on how to make it harder for non-experienced users to grab the content  Here are some directions    General   Overlay the respecitive contents with a transparent  lt DIV gt  or a transparent image  as described in some answers to this question  Open the website in a frameset  so saving may miss the frame content  Open the website via window open   to hide the menu bar  Disable right-clicks via JavaScript  not recommended due to all the side-effects on usability  Load the page s HTML code from another file  which may check for a specific referer or which may be ROT13  via JavaScript  so it s harder to access the source code  Tell the browser that all content is display none for the printer  something like  media print   body  div  p   display  none      Use JavaScript to hide the content before a client makes a screenshot  see Stop User from using    Print Scrn     Try to disable or overwrite the clipboard  see this post   Images   Do not use the  lt img gt  tag for images but set the image as background for a  lt DIV gt  Wrap images into SVGs or Flash movies to make them very hard to access in a usable format  Disable caching for images  via  lt meta gt  tag or by setting the appropriate header on server delivery   so they are not stored in the browser cache  immeaditely accessible on the client s computer   Cut an image into parts  so it takes some extra work to reconstruct the whole image Add onmousedown events to images  e g   display a copyright alert  Deliver the image via server script  e g   PHP  and check the referer   Videos   Stream videos to prevent simple downloading via URL  Wrap videos into a Flash movie  Use some nasty format that supports DRM   Texts   Make text unselectable  see How to make HTML Text unselectable  Additionally to overlaying  wrap the text into JavaScript  e g   after ROT13 or loaded dynamically from a second file   so the text is not directly available in the source code  Convert texts to images  this may decrease display quality   SVGs or Flash    Again  I repeat that none of this will stop an experienced user from grabbing the content  e g  by making a screenshop and - optionally - run OCR on it   Sometimes it s as easy as using the browser s developer tools or using the website without JavaScript  Yet  it will give inexperiences users a hard time  so they may look for some easier source to grab from   Also keep in mind that the above techniques will affect search engines when reading the page s content  if you re interested in blocking them  start with a robots txt    Thank you for any other ideas to complement the above list

User · Answer

No  it s not possible   If you can see it  you can get it

User · Answer

In short  no  If someone can view an image or video in their browser then they have  by definition  downloaded it  That s how the web works - it is client server based  Whatever you can view in your browser  client  has been transfered to your computer from the remote website  server

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