Protect Image Location

[ethan]

I've search and read many threads about protect image location and watermark or something like that.
but there's no one looks great for me.   that's fine, i can do it by myself.
but there are too many place to be modified... it's not good for next upgrade of coppermine
also if you hide every image location by watermark, it might crash your server's and effciency is bad.

Why protect image location??
If you have any experience in coppermine, then you properly know the folder tree where all images stored.
And the naming function is too easy to guess, once i knew the thumbnail filename, just right-click and got it, then i know the original image filename.
so the member function looks weak for any album which could be preview by thumbnail.

I think the better way is separate the place/folder of  thumbnails (include normal size image) and original image
even renamed the original image
then all we have to do is protect the original image, even normal size image, by something like watermark
to hide the real path of orginal image.

[kegobeer]

The dev team doesn't care much about watermarking.  We all know it's virtually impossible to protect your images unless you add a watermark before uploading.  On the fly watermarking just eats up cpu cycles.

We won't add this to the core code.  If people want to make watermarking mods, they are welcome to.  Personally, if I wanted to protect my images, I wouldn't keep them on the internet.

[ethan]

Thanks for notice  
I don't care about watermarking neither.  just one of hide image location methods.

take phpBB Attachment MOD for example

this url shows a thumbnail

Code Select Expand

<img src="download.php?pid=1&thumb=1">

and this url shows the original image

Code Select Expand

<img src="download.php?pid=1">

at the same time, in download.php, it may check user's permission also.
and prevent people from accessing images directly include those who doesn't have permission to access

[Joachim Müller]

I know no method that can really disguise a pic's url, unless it is created dynamically when requested (and permission checks have been performed before). People will always be able to steal your pics if you publish them on the internet, there are just ways to make this harder for them, but none that makes it impossible. The discussion has been lead before on "no-right-click" scripts that deny users this ability: imo all you do by applying such "tricks" to your pages is make people even more eager to actually steal your site's content. Disgusing image locations by some redirection mechanisms might do the trick on some servers, but will be impossible on others (e.g. everything that is related to mod_rewrite that will only work on Lunix/Apache).
I fully agree with kegobeer: such code doesn't belong into the core code of coppermine, as it will make the usage of coppermine even more complicated for most newbie users. Instead, it should be done as a mod - preferably using the new plugin api that is going to be part of cpg1.4.x

Joachim