setting up online downloads

[pesty]

Hi everyone,

I'm probably in the wrong type of forum, but I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction.

I am in the process of building a website that will allow the user to download photos for print or save to their desktop as a screen saver.

I know I can just upload the photos and let the user right click and save the photo. These photos are copyright and the right click will be disabled. So that option will not work.

Can someone tell me how to add photos to my website so the user will actually have to download it instead of just saving it.

Thanks in advance
Pesty

[paulnj]

Right click disabled is a waste of your time dude! If somebody wants to take your image they can bypass that with ease.

[another view]

user will actually have to download it instead of just saving it

Curious - what's the difference between the two?

You can tell by my question that I can't offer help!

[tijean]

So you're asking how to let your visitors save something after you've set up something (right-click) that is specifically designed to keep people from saving the very thing that you want them to save.

DUDE!!!!!! Circular logic hits a road block.

Don't use the right-click block. It's annoying as all holy hell and does NOTHING to prevent someone with half a brain from saving your stuff to their harddrive and possibly reposting it.

If you are so concerned about guarding your copyright protected material, then why would you want people to have high resolution images that they can print?

Nooooooooooo.

I'm sorry, but you're making my brain seize.

[natefromri]

Pesty...let me try to take a stab at this. First, I would not disable your rightclick. This only annoys people and there are many ways to bypass this for this that want to. First, they could view your source by selecting it from the browser menu, see where the photo is, and go to the URL directly. Secondly, they could simply save your entire web site to their computer and view the image there in the folder of images they just downloaded from your site. I've done both in my quest to get some images onto my computer, both with a minimum of fuss. There is absolutely no difference at all between "right clicking and saving as" AND "downloading". Your "saving as" IS "downloading".

If you're trying to set up a gallery of protected images for your clients to go to and download images to, have you considered password protecting the folder where the images are kept? This will at least prevent most unauthorized viewings of your photos.

If you truly want to display your images as examples, and then have somebody download a larger version of it, I'd place the image as an embedded Macromedia Flash image, which is quick to load on the computer, and a fairly small file size, then place the full image in a .zip file next to the image for people to download. Once they unzip the file, the image will be inside the zip file.

Anyhow, that's my take. Good luck! Do you have an example page of what somebody else is doing that you'd like to emulate? If so, post it here so we can take a look at what you're trying to do.

--Nate

[qball]

My two cents worth...

DON'T DISABLE RIGHT CLICK!!!

If I can use Getty Images' site as an example : On there you can browse smaller images but if you want to use the hi-res images you must purchase them before being able to download. The images on the site can be right-clicked and saved, but they are firstly lo res and secondly have a watermark on them on spots where it can't just be cloned out.
You would most probably do the same thing - the images you display should be protected by a watermark for example so that it won't be usable as a desktop background, but if they want the full sized there can be a link to download/purchase.