Protect a folder of pictures

[Mark Schonewille]

Hi Ludovic and Joe,

I fully agree with Joe. It is a waste of time to try to protect a  
folder. When your programme is running, the folder will be  
unprotected and people can copy the files. If people can't figure out  
how to copy files, they can still make a screenshot.

As an alternative, you can make your own format. For example, you can  
save the imagedata, mask data and alphadata of an image object to a  
file and use these instead of a complete picture. Or you can use  
normal PNG files but add a number of characters at the beginning and  
end of the file, which you will ignore when reading the file before  
you set the text of an image object. This is faster than completely  
scrambling a picture, but nothing will be as fast as setting the  
filename of an image object to the path to an unscrambled image.

You might be tempted to use encryption, but that takes a lot of CPU  
power and will strongly reduce performance of your application.

Just don't forget that one could always make screenshots.

Best,

Mark

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Op 18-mei-2007, om 21:15 heeft Joe Lewis Wilkins het volgende  
geschreven:

> Hi Ludovic,
>
> I think you're wasting your time trying to protect pictures. If you  
> use them, someone will find a way to copy them. Maybe you could  
> come up with a scheme to scramble the pixels and then unscramble  
> them in your program when you use them, but that is going to take a  
> lot of effort and will really slow down the performance of the  
> program at some point. I'd say you should just write a pretty  
> threatening copyright notice and then make sure you follow up on  
> it. That will scare most away. The others would take a baseball bat  
> along side the head.
>
> Just MHO,
>
> Joe Wilkins