As many of you may know, photos online are rarely safe from being stolen. Wether it be the ubiquitous ‘Right click’ ‘hot-linking’ or even, as is the case with most PC users, just pressing the ‘print screen’ key! Almost all sites prevent ‘right click downloading’ including our free photo hosting site Clickasnap, however, as of today, not one online photo hosting site protects against the use of the ‘Print Screen’ button on the PC’s keyboard. Now, there are many ways to download images by screen printing, for example, on the MAC there are 6 methods of doing so, there are also multiple apps, and of course users can goto an extreme and add a box between the monitor and the computer to record everything on screen. Whilst it would be great to prevent all of this, it just isn’t realistic to do so. Rather, we, who as a tech company on the leading edge of online image hosting technology, are positioning ourselves as making it as difficult as possible to steal that image that user wants for their Meta cover photo. The harder it is to do so, the more appealing spending a few pounds on the download is rather than spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get round the anti-piracy systems.
Today we launch ‘WIPT’ or ‘Watermark-less Image Protection Technology‘ as a free add on to our Pro accounts (£5 per month or £48 per year). This is, over the course of Clickasnaps’ life, going to be what we put all of our advanced anti-theft image protection technology under. The first piece of tech to go under this? Stopping the use of the ‘print screen’ button that is found on all PC’s. It may not seem like much, but just offering this means we offer more protection for our users imagery than any other site does today, and we plan to continue the development of this tech to encompass more systems to stop the theft of your images. Whilst we can’t currently stop the tech on Macs, these only make up 10% of the online market and it is something we will arrest as funds permit it.
If you have any questions, please just pop into our forums and ask away, or email me direct at Tom@clickasnap.com