You have just completed a series of digital art creations and you are ready to display them on your site. But before you decide to put your images online for the world to see, be sure that you protect your digital art. Below are a few solutions you can use to protect your digital art.

Step #1 Get Your Art Copyrighted

Getting your images copyrighted is the first thing you should do in order to protect your images. If you really want to protect unauthorized use of your graphics then you should not skip this step. There are various ways of copyrighting your images but only the government of your country can give an official copyright registration. The best method of copyrighting images is to create a batch of images and to copyright them all at once. Copyrighting images one at a time will be very expensive. There are many types of copyright services out there so research a few before you buy.

Step #2 Watermark Your Images

Place a watermark on your image that contains one or all of the following: Name of Site, Name of Artist, Year and month that it was made or website address. There are many ways to create water marks as well as hiding your watermark within the image. Digital watermark may also allow you to search the internet in order to track who is using your graphics online without permission. Because digital watermarks can be very expensive GSG will provide watermark tutorials.

The Worst Way to Protect Your Image

The worst thing you can do when it comes to protecting your images is to rely 100% on no right click and html protectors. At the most these protection methods will make it difficult for those with little computer knowledge (in terms of saving things off the Internet) to save your images. The Graphics Site Guide has tested sites that have the html protector as well as right click, print screen, and save disable codes on their site. Below are the results

I. All methods failed in protecting images

II. The HTML protected the html, but was still able to determin image URL

If you are only using the code protection but do not have any type system of recognition that shows you are the owner of the graphic then you are just wasting time, money and effort.