Cel Ganking Prevention

Kitt has inspired me in the notion of making protection that inconveniences cel theives to the point where it's just not worth it to steal things. I'm awaiting permission to share Kitt's idea but I have a few too:

The goal:

- Annoy people who want to save your images to the point where it's just not worth it to take from you.

- Must be able to upload a normal JPG and have Rubberslug automatically apply the copy-protection for you.

My ideas:

- Chop up images into a bunch of 100x100 squares. Looks normal to a regular human being. Requires lots of manual labor to reassemble.

- Load a transparent image in front of a cel so that even if you right-click on it, you'll be saving the transparent image.

The big problem:

- You could still take a screenshot, but that would involve cutting images out of screencaps and should annoy most kids into not copying images.

I'll work on a few demos to see if I can make some of these solutions work.

This image protection game is kinda fun. Man, this server rocks. (It's FAST at real-time image manipulation.) Here's my first attempt based on the feedback in the other thread.

[quote]I'd prefer to have the available image smaller than a screencap, to make them less enticing. Screencap fancels will look different than ones based off of real cels, since the whole cel is never filmed. [/quote]

Yesterday's watermark and scaling demo:
http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show2.aspx?ImageID=123774&X=300

Watermark, Autoscale, Crop 10% from each side
http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show3.aspx?ImageID=123774&X=300

Picking the size of the scaled image is easy. Use the "img_show3.aspx" link and change the value of x to 500. Or 200. Whatever. We can store that preference and the amount you want to crop in the database.

http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show3.aspx?ImageID=123774&X=500
http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show3.aspx?ImageID=123774&X=200 (chops off the watermark. oops.)

I still need to make the thing that automatically breaks cels up into a bunch of pieces. I figured out how to do it a few minutes ago but it'll take a little while to put together. Anyone else have any weird ideas they want me to try?

Here's the thing that automatically splits any image up into a bunch of pieces. I broke the image up into 9 pieces, but you could theoretically break it up into a hundred or more if you wanted to. You can tell where the pieces are if you highlight the images by dragging your mouse over the images while holding down left-click.

I didn't hook up the cropping or the watermarking for this particular demo.

http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show4b.aspx

That's a real nice deterrent~ I like that better than watermarking, if you could have the option to set that up would be da'bomb.

^_^

Just in case you check here before getting my email, Jason, of course you have permission! I'm glad my modest suggestion was helpful. *^_^*

For those who may have galleries other than on Rubberslug and who aren't the programming geniuses that Jason is, here's the basic idea. It takes a bit of effort, but for certain cels some collectors may want to consider doing it.

http://home.earthlink.net/~stargarde/MaskedGIFs.html

Just as I finished the process I realized that it could be done with JPGs too, by color-selecting a block of color (hopefully one that runs through a significant portion of the image) and erasing it from the JPG, and reconstituting the correct image with the appropriate background color as in the GIF example.

For Rubberslug galleries, the ideas you are coming up with to deter image theft are ever so much more elegant! Three cheers for Jason!