When you share a gallery with a client, you are showing your work before you have been paid in full. It is only natural to wonder what stops someone from taking the photos without going through the checkout.
The short answer: there are several layers that help a lot, and one thing no website can do. In this post we cover both.
The watermark travels with the photo
The watermark is the protection that carries the most weight, and in PhotoHeart you decide whether to use it. If you turn it on, it is applied over the images in the gallery, so any screenshot your client takes comes out marked.
Two things worth being clear about:
- It only appears if you turn it on. Nothing adds a mark at the moment of capture. If the gallery has no watermark, the screenshot comes out clean.
- It is set per package and can be changed for a specific session. You can have a watermark on your selection galleries and remove it for a single session without touching the rest.
Saving the photo, blocked
In galleries without downloads enabled, the usual gestures for taking an image from a website don't work:
- Right-click on a computer: it doesn't offer "Save image as".
- Press and hold on a phone: it doesn't open the menu to save the photo.
- Print or save as PDF: in galleries without full download enabled, the page comes out without the photos, and the keyboard shortcuts for saving and printing are disabled.
That last point is recent. Printing to PDF was the easiest way to pull out all the photos at once, and it no longer works.
Downloads are up to you
What your client can download is not a global setting: it is defined in each session package.
- No download. The client sees the gallery and picks their photos, nothing more.
- All photos. Full download and, if you want, image-by-image download too.
- Only the selected ones. The download opens when the client finalizes their selection, and only for the photos they have selected.
One detail: in the package, downloads cannot be turned on while the watermark is on. It makes sense, because they are two different moments in the work. First you show with a watermark; then you deliver without it.
What no website can do
Time to be honest. No web page can block a screenshot. The capture is made by the phone or the computer, not the page, and the browser doesn't even find out. We already explained this in detail in The truth about "screenshot detection" in photographer galleries.
Only an installed app can prevent screenshots. The price is high: your client would have to download an app, create an account and remember yet another password just to see their photos. Many would never open the gallery.
At PhotoHeart we chose the opposite: your client receives a link and gets in. No app and no account. And if the gallery has a watermark, whatever they capture comes out marked.
In short
| Protection | What it does |
|---|---|
| Watermark | Marks any screenshot. Only if you turn it on. |
| Right-click and long press | Can't save when downloads are off. |
| Print or save as PDF | Comes out without photos when there is no full download. |
| Download control | No download, all, or only the selected ones, per package. |
| Screenshot blocking | Doesn't exist on the web. Not here or anywhere else. |
If you don't use a watermark on your selection galleries yet, it is the first change we recommend. You will find it under Settings → Sessions.
The PhotoHeart Team