September 27, 2008, 12:28:37 PM
There's another forum I'm on where the discussion of blocking right-clicks comes up every few days it seems. People put up their first website and are terrified when they find out how easy it is to right-click on an image and save it.
The problem is that it's trivial for anyone with a moderate amount of computer knowledge to get around right-click blocking. Well, it's also a problem that blocking right-clicks is just annoying, but I guess that's a different issue.
Off the top of my head, here's the ways I can think of to get around right-click blocks.
Turn off JavaScriptThe block is a JavaScript code, so turning off JS will make it useless. It's pretty easy to go into the settings in IE and FF and turn off JavaScript. A FireFox extension like the
Web Developer Toolbar makes it even easier.
If you're using FF, that extension is a great one to add if you do any type of web design or want to see how web sites are laid out.Drag the imageMost web browsers will let you drag an image from the web browser to a folder and download.
PrtScrnIn Windows you can press the PrtScrn key to copy whatever is on your monitor to the clipboard. From there it's easy to paste it into an image editing program and save.
I assume Macs have a similar key, although I haven't used a Mac since 7th grade.
Screen capture softwareA step up from PrtScrn, screen capture programs make it really easy to grab sections of the screen and save, copy, or print it. I use one called SnagIt.
Pull it from their cacheThe most time consuming, but will pretty much always work. For an image to be visible on your computer it has to be downloaded to your browser's cache. You can then go into the cache folder and find images. The filename probably doesn't match, making this a really time consuming method. But it pretty much always works.
Still want to do it?And, just for completeness, here's the shortest code I know of to block right-clicks. Find <body> in your HTML and replace it with
<body onContextMenu="alert('Put your message here'); return false;">
Another reason why notThe reason I really don't like right-click blocking is that it's just annoying to be on a site that you can't right click on. Everybody that right-clicks on your site is not trying to download an image to cheat you out of money. I use my right mouse button a lot to go back to previous pages, bookmark pages, and other stuff that's been added to my browser context menu by extensions. A majority of the time if I try to right-click and it's blocked the next thing I click on is the back button.
And the messages are usually so accusational. I've accidentally hit the right-mouse button on pages only to be "greeted" by a message telling me that "all images are copyright by Joe Smith and any theft will be prosecuted". I feel like I'm being accused of something even though it was just an inadvertent click.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2008, 04:20:33 PM by Ryan Nutt »
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