Transparent Images
UPDATED 3-14-04 - See NOTE near bottom of this page
To demonstrate this technique, we are using (with her permission) the original Lesley Ann Hartman painting titled "Pearl from the Desert". You can visit Lesley's own website to view and purchase many of her beautiful paintings and prints.
This technique uses a single cell table containing a transparent GIF image with the Arabian JPG file used as the background-image for the cell. The transparent GIF was saved with the same name as the JPG that contains the painting. The transparent GIF is actually only 1 x 1 pixels, but was stretched to the same dimensions of the JPG. Do you need a transparent GIF file? Feel free to download ours (right click and select Save As).
If you try to save the painting, you get the transparent file, not the actual image. Of course, there are ways around this technique, but this will slow down most casual surfers.
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<table
width="383" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td style="background-image:
url(ActualImage.jpg)">
<img
border="0" src="Transparent.gif"
width="383" height="450" alt="An Arabian
Horse">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
If your server is using Apache Server software version 1.3.13 or higher, you might also be interested in this article about image theft for additional ideas on how to prevent others from using your images. This is rather technical and involves changing your .htacess file on your server, but it's a nice way to prevent bandwidth theft as well as some hints about image theft.
Updated 3-14-04
You could also use a DIV for this instead of a table.