Bender - Mosaic Image Protection

Your WordPress images travel as a mosaic. Whoever steals them finds only shuffled tiles. Bender protects your site's photos from scrapers, AI training bots, and outright theft, without touching SEO, speed, or the experience of your human visitors. How it works On upload (or from the Media Library), Bender automatically generates two derivatives for every image:

1. Mosaic atlas – the image in full resolution, with an N×N grid permuted and flipped via HMAC-SHA256 → Fisher-Yates using a per-image secret key. A single CDN-cacheable file: downloaded as-is, it's an unreadable puzzle.
2. Signed low-res – a reduced version with a visible diagonal watermark and IPTC copyright metadata (read by Google Images), used as the <img> source: SEO, social previews, and the no-JavaScript fallback.

The original hi-res URL never appears in the page markup. In the browser, Bender waits for the image to enter the viewport, downloads the atlas, requests the reconstruction map from a REST endpoint protected by a time-limited HMAC token, and reassembles the mosaic on a <canvas> with a blur-up cross-fade. What it blocks (and what it honestly doesn't)

• HTML scrapers / mass bots — blocked: the HTML only contains the watermarked low-res
• Right-click "Save image" — blocked: the canvas isn't a file
• Hi-res hotlinking — blocked: no plain hi-res URL exists
• Downloading the atlas — useless: permuted, flipped tiles, no map
• Map enumeration via REST — mitigated: time-limited HMAC token, per-IP rate limiting
• Screenshots — not blockable, by any technology

That's why Bender always signs, not just hides: visible watermarking and IPTC metadata make authorship provable even when a copy slips through. WooCommerce Product images are protected like any other image, and the product gallery is handled specifically: the zoom link and the gallery thumbnails serve the protected copy, so the original file is not reachable from the product page. Variation images, schema.org structured data and the Store API — the other places where WooCommerce prints image URLs — are covered by Bender Pro. What's included This plugin is fully functional as-is, with no locked or restricted features:

• Automatic protection on upload, unlimited images
• 6×6 mosaic grid
• Visible "Bender™" watermark
• Default IPTC copyright metadata
• JPEG atlas format
• Bulk protect/unprotect from the Media Library, with a protection status column and a protection filter in both list and grid mode
• WooCommerce: the product gallery's zoom link and thumbnails point at the protected copy, not at the original file

Denser grids, WebP/PNG atlas formats, fully customizable watermark and IPTC text, invisible forensic (LSB) watermarking, configurable token validity, and wider WooCommerce coverage (variation images, structured data, Store API) are available in Bender Pro, a separate plugin distributed outside WordPress.org. Bender Pro also leaves images unmarked: the “© protected” badge is off by default there, while here it is on by default (you can untick it in the settings).

1. Upload the bender-mosaic-image-protection folder to /wp-content/plugins/, or install directly from the Plugins screen.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Requires PHP 7.4+ with the GD extension (standard on virtually any WordPress hosting).
4. Go to the Bender menu to adjust served resolution, quality, and watermark/IPTC toggles. New uploads are protected automatically by default.
5. For existing images: Media Library → select images → "Protect with Bender" bulk action.

Page caching: align the token validity (24 hours by default) with your page cache duration, so tokens served from cache remain valid.

0.1.14

• Closed a hole on WooCommerce shops: the product gallery wraps every image in a link to the full-size original (the zoom/lightbox) and keeps the same file in its data-thumb attributes. Bender rewrites image tags, not those, so on a shop the original was one click away from any protected product image. Both now point at the signed low-res.

0.1.13

• The Media Library in grid mode now has the same protection controls as the list mode: a "Filter by protection" dropdown next to the date filter, and a "Protect this image with Bender" checkbox in the attachment details panel, which protects (or unprotects) the image as soon as you tick it. Before, grid mode had neither — the filter and the row actions only exist in the list view.

0.1.12

• The "© protected" badge on images now follows the site language instead of always reading "© protetta" in Italian: it ships translated in the six bundled locales, and pages already sitting in a page cache keep showing the previous text until they are regenerated.
• Fixed four settings-page strings that were left untranslated in every bundled language — the "Custom themes / page builders" row (label, checkbox and description) and the "what it stops" summary line — so a non-English dashboard no longer shows half the page in English.

0.1.11

• Added a "Protection" filter to the Media Library (list view), next to the date filter: show only protected or only unprotected images. Handy on large libraries to find what still needs protecting.
• Fixed protected images shrinking when the theme's <img> tag carries no width/height attributes. The tag's only size reference then becomes the low-res file (480px wide) that replaces the original in src, so the image — and the frame around it — collapsed to that width. Bender now carries over the dimensions the tag had before protection, taken from the file it pointed to. The protected image also keeps a max-width of its own, for themes that size images with a child-combinator rule (.slide > img), which no longer matches once the image sits inside the frame.

0.1.10

• Fixed protected images changing the page layout. The frame that replaces the <img> was a block-level box with its own aspect ratio, so it — not the theme — decided the size: images sized by the theme through CSS rules on the img selector (logos capped to a fixed height, sliders with a minimum height) grew to their full aspect ratio, containers that took their height from the image collapsed or stretched, and margins coming from copied utility classes were applied twice. The frame is now a plain inline-block wrapper with no aspect ratio of its own, and the image inside keeps the width, height and object-fit the theme gave it, so the layout is identical to the same page without the plugin.

0.1.9

• Fixed the protected frame collapsing to its own aspect ratio instead of the box the theme had set: when the original <img> (or its <picture> wrapper) carried layout classes or inline styles — the common width:100%; height:100%; object-fit:cover inside a fixed-height container used by carousels, cards and hero sections — the frame that replaces it now inherits them, so the image keeps the width and height it had before.
• Fixed lazy-loading themes and plugins undoing the protection on scroll: data-src/data-srcset (and the other usual lazy-load attributes) were left on the tag, so the lazy loader put the original image URL back into src as soon as the image entered the viewport.

0.1.8

• Fixed the "Custom themes / page builders" fallback (universal_scan) leaving <picture> elements (responsive images with multiple <source> breakpoints, e.g. carousels/sliders) completely unprotected: the hi-res URLs in the <source> tags bypassed the mosaic entirely, and the generated canvas ignored the width/height intended for that layout. <picture>/<source> are now replaced by the protected frame like a plain <img>, and the frame keeps the original width/height aspect ratio when set.

0.1.7

• Fixed the "Custom themes / page builders" fallback (universal_scan, added in 0.1.6): when the only protected image on a page was reached exclusively through this fallback, the mosaic viewer script/style were enqueued too late to ever be printed (the fallback rewrites the fully-buffered page, which closes after wp_head/wp_footer already ran), so visitors saw the static low-res <img> with no <canvas> upgrade — the image looked unprotected even though the server-side markup was correct. Assets are now enqueued as soon as the fallback decides to scan the page, before output buffering starts.

0.1.6

• Added a fallback for custom-coded themes and page builders that print <img> tags outside the_content()/the_post_thumbnail() (e.g. wp_get_attachment_image() called directly, or a raw <img src="..."> in a hand-built gallery/slider): those images were left completely unprotected before, even after marking the attachment as protected. Bender now also scans the fully rendered page and swaps in the protected version for any image it recognizes. New "Custom themes / page builders" setting to disable this if not needed.

0.1.5

• Fixed 3 strings (the settings page intro and the "what it stops" note) that silently failed to load their bundled translation because the English source used a straight apostrophe (') while the .po files had a typographic one (’). All 6 bundled languages regenerated.

0.1.4

• Bundled ready-made translations (Italian, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified) in languages/, loaded automatically via load_plugin_textdomain() — no need to wait for community translations on translate.wordpress.org.

0.1.3

• All admin-facing strings (settings page, Media Library column, row/bulk actions, admin notices, error messages) are now proper English source strings wrapped for translation with the bender-mosaic-image-protection text domain, instead of hardcoded Italian. Translators can now localize the plugin via translate.wordpress.org.

0.1.2

• The fixed values of this edition (6×6 grid, watermark text/opacity, IPTC copyright/credit, 24h REST token TTL) are no longer implemented through generically-parameterized helper functions called with constant arguments. Each is now hardcoded directly inside the function that uses it (no unused $n/$opacity/$ttl-style parameters left over), so the free codebase itself contains no latent/dormant configurability for these values.

0.1.1

• All function, class, define, and option/transient names now use the bendmoim/BENDMOIM prefix (was bender/Bender, with one stray pg_rl_ transient key).
• Removed dormant Pro-only code paths from the free codebase (variable grid size, WebP/PNG atlas formats, customizable watermark/IPTC text, LSB steganographic watermark, configurable token TTL) instead of merely locking them via options. This edition now hardcodes the free-tier values described in the plugin's own settings screen.

0.1.0

• Initial release.