7 ways to copy “protected” photos

We updated a website at work this week, and a request of a collaborator of our client was that their photos be “protected” against theft and illegal copy. To them, this meant deactivating the contextual menu to prevent people from clicking on “Save image as…”

We argued that this would not prevent anybody from saving an image and, more importantly, that it would degrade the user experience, but our protestations fell unto deaf ears.

Here are seven ways to download the images you want, even if right click is disabled.

• Use Opera: Opera doesn’t honour the oncontextmenu directive, so your right clicks will happily give you the menu with the “Save image as…” option
• View source: “Use the source, Luke!” Find the image you want, it has to have a URL, paste it in the address bar, File => Save, bingo!
• Use Firebug: This is exactly like viewing the source, but it’s easier to find the URL of the particular image you’re interested in
• Save entire page: In the File menu of many browsers, there’s a “Save page as…” option, and you can select to save the entire page, not just the HTML. This will download all the media files used on that page, including the “protected” files!
• wget: wget -r http://website.com. Nuff said.
• Drag and drop: Open an image editing program, and just drag the “uncopiable” into the canvas. Optionally remove the watermark.
• Take a screenshot: Just press on PrintScreen, paste the image in any image editing program and get the image.