The easy, cheap and reliable way to better protect your Squarespace website images from being stolen online
By Allie Astell, Founder of Manage My Website
Almost every month for the past year I’ve been running Squarespace workshops for Royal Photographic Society members. The workshops are great fun and as well as helping members to learn how to create their own Squarespace website, I learn things, too. I’ve certainly learned just how much of a concern online image theft is.
In every session I’ve done with Royal Photographic Society members, they’ve asked me how they can better protect their website photographs from image thieves.
It’s been a big problem for professional and amateur photographers for many years. Often small-business owners also take their own original photographs and upload them to their website, and these too can fall victim to image thieves.
Finding out if your images have been stolen online
You may never know that your original photographic image has been downloaded from your website or social media account and used without your permission, which infringes your copyright as the image creator or owner.
Some examples are fairly innocent, with someone seeing an image they like online, downloading and sharing it on social media perhaps or using it on their own website, without realising they’re doing anything wrong. But in other cases, image thieves know they’re wilfully infringing copyright by using or selling someone else’s images for their own benefit.
Using Google’s Search by Image feature may allow you to find out whether someone has stolen and is using your image(s) online. You upload your image(s) or image URL(s) to search and soon you may find out. A wide variety of other options also enable you to carry out “reverse image searches”, including Pixsy, Berify, TinEye and Image Raider, but there are many other platforms and apps available.
New plugin to prevent your images being stolen online
We’ve created websites for many photographers over the years, as well as lots of others who use professional or their own original images on their website, including creative agencies, e-commerce businesses and a wide range of others. I wanted to help them to better protect their images from online theft, while providing a solution for new Manage My Website customers.
So, after some research, we came up with a new plugin that prevents image theft from Squarespace websites by right-clicking them to save or dragging them off onto a computer desktop. The plugin also prevents image thieves from pressing the image on a phone or tablet screen to save photographs to their camera roll.
At Manage My Website, we’ve already added the plugin to some of our client websites and it works very well for: cover pages; event images; image, gallery and summary blocks; thumbnails; gallery pages and sections, logos; portfolio pages, product images and promotional pop-ups.
You can’t use the plugin if you have a Squarespace Personal Pricing Plan; you’ll need to upgrade to the Business Plan (another £5 a month) to add the plugin code to your website. The plugin costs an additional £50 and it’s reasonably easy to install; we send detailed instructions to our customers who want to use it (although, to make life easier, we’re offering to install it for them for £15).
Although nothing can provide total protection (you can’t stop all methods of image theft), the plugin is an excellent solution that will prevent your Squarespace website from unauthorised people right-clicking to save your photos, illustrations and logos, while stopping them from dragging your images onto their computer desktop and saving them to their camera roll. When you value your original website images, for such a small cost, that protection is well worth having.
More information
Find out more about more about the plugin here.
The Royal Photographic Society has produced a copyright basics factsheet.
Government website Gov.uk also provides a useful overview of copyright in the UK, with advice on how to defend your intellectual property.