Securing your images from your visitors is a difficult task, but using the clear dot gif can help prevent the average visitor in thinking they've stolen your images, but in fact they haven't. All they've done is downloaded the clear dot gif.

However most visitors can easily get past this, by simply searching through your source code to get the actual location of the image(s). This normally discourages many people and confuses them, because they don't understand HTML.

To put the clear dot gif to use, we simply use the BACKGROUND="image.jpg" attribute of the <TABLE> tag. I've shown an example below for you to try out...

<table background="anastacia[1].jpg"
border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
   <tr>
      <td>&nbsp;</td>
   </tr>
</table>

Gives this:


Now, we have two problems to solve. Firstly, you can't see the whole image. Secondly, when you right click on the image you still can save it in some browsers. To solve these we can use the clear dot gif. This image will create a clear covering over your picture. You set the size of this image to be exactly the same size as your real one. So now we try this code below...

<table background="anastacia[1].jpg"
border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
   <tr>
      <td><img src="clear.gif" height="97" width="102"></td>
   </tr>
</table>

Gives this:


When you try to right click on this image to save it, you get a box that looks like you are saving the image, but you are really saving the clear cover to your hard drive.(If you want the clear.gif for later use, just try downloading the pic above as you would normally do) It is impossible to download this secure image unless you view the source of the HTML file. If you want to get more confusing, change the name of your "clear.gif" to be "image1.gif", or anything else, and then it will look even more realistic when the browser asks where you want to save the image.

This clear dot gif trick is effective because visitors will try to save your image(s), and they will think they did it successfully and they will move on. Later, when they try to view the downloaded image they will see a 1x1 transparent picture.

NOTE:  Some older browsers do not understand the BACKGROUND attribute of the <TABLE> tag, and the image will not appear at all.