ArtSites Updates

We have heard from many of our artists that they would like to better protect the images of their artwork from being "pirated" or copied off of their website. This is actually a complex subject that we covered quite some time ago in the article Protecting Artistic Works on the Web.

Our basic assertion then, as it is now, is that such pirating of images is not a loss of revenue so it is important that whatever we do to "protect" your images does not detract from the experience for those visitors who just want to view and evaluate your artwork. We currently do a number of things to help with this issue, including reducing the size and quality of images just enough to only be useful for the specific needs of the website.

That said, we have added a NEW feature (disabled by default) that removes the menu visitors would normally get when they right click on an image. Generally, on the right-click menu is an option to save the image, i.e. download it, to the visitor's computer. By enabling this feature, your visitors will no longer be able to use the right-click menu to copy or save images for their own use.

This is by no means a foolproof mechanism to prevent pirating of images. But, it is much more difficult to access your online images. So, this effectively prevents "casual" pirating of images.

You can enable this feature (which disables the menu) by doing the following:

1. Go to the Advanced page in your Administration Panel
2. Scroll down to the Images section.
3. In that section there is a check box with the prompt "Disable web browser right click menu on images (copy protect image)".
4. Click the check box.
5. Scroll to the top or bottom of the page and click the "Update Advanced Settings" button to save your changes!
6. Your images will now be more protected.

Please let us know if you have any issues with this or have any questions.