We understand that many photographers are concerned about images being taken from their sites without permission. This article is intended to explain how Fotomoto works with your files and provide suggestions on how to best-protect your images.
The first thing to understand is that Fotomoto works with images on *your* website - please see "How Fotomoto works on your site" for more information. Note that we don't control the servers that host your website images, so any "right-click" protection or other copy deterrents are not a function of our service. The code you want to run on your website is up to you and your hosting provider; our approach is to be flexible enough to work with whatever method you decide to use to protect your images.
To protect your publicly-available images, we recommend that you copyright and watermark them, as there is no effective way to prevent them from being copied if the file can be viewed in a Web browser. For more information about how Fotomoto works with watermarked images, please see How to use Fotomoto with watermarked images.
Important: should you decide to implement image "protection" code on your site, requests for your images originating from 'fotomoto.com' servers need to be allowed in order for Fotomoto to work properly. This is because we need to be able to access the images in order to add them to your Fotomoto Dashboard. How do I use Fotomoto with password-protected sites shows an example of how to allow access by our servers for those using Apache's basic HTTP authentication. If you're using a different approach, you'll need to otherwise "white list" requests from 'fotomoto.com'.
Last, it's also important to understand that the high-resolution files used to create prints and other products do *not* need to be publicly-available. These files can either be uploaded directly to us when an order is placed, or you can use Auto Pickup to find your print files automatically to fetch the files as needed from an online storage area that's configured to restrict access to your files.
We hope this article helped you to understand Fotomoto's role in protecting your images, and if you have any questions please feel free to contact Fotomoto Support.