Imaguard

Imaguard allows you to protect your images in two ways: -A non-aggressive protection where any direct hits on your images are sent to a post page showing the image in your usual page layout. This prevents your image from being used on remote sites that you don't approve and it will make sure people visiting the image file itself (f ex people clicking through from Google Image Search) will see the image in a page layout (with your site menus, widgets and ads). -An aggressive protection where the image is darkened and a text is placed on top of the image if the image is accessed from remote sites you haven't approved or through a direct visit. This is very useful to direct visitors from the new Google Image Search where Google will display a large preview of the image without redirecting the visitor to your site. You can use this to make the image dark and put a text saying "Click to see" on top as a watermark. The plugin is partly intended to prevent bandwidth stealing by external sites hotlinking your images - but may also greatly increase visitors from image search engines. Particularly, as mentioned above, from Google Image Search after their latest update which no longer opens the image on top of your site but instead encourages visits directly to the image itself. For the non-aggressive protection, Imaguard lets you set the dimensions for the image to be shown inside your normal site layout. When clicked the image will show in a CSS popover in full size. For the aggressive protection Imaguard lets you set the text to display over the image. Imaguard lets you define a whitelist of sites that you want to allow as referrers. Your own site is always allowed as a referrer - so any visitor clicking on a link to the image on your own site is allowed to view the image. It you in addition want to allow a friend to directly link or include your images on his site, simply put his website www.friend.com on the whitelist. Many users also put sites such as twitter.com and facebook.com on their whitelist. Imaguard also allows you to define a list of "user agents" who can view your images in a normal way. You will probably want to add googlebot to this list, but you can also set this to allow certain browsers and mobile devices to view images directly. Imaguard uses htaccess rewrite to direct visitors correctly. You MUST have rewrites enabled (WP permalink) in order to use Imaguard. For the text-over-image functionality you must be using PHP5 with the GD library (this is the most common server configuration and chances are this is what you already have installed on your server). See notes on installation below.

To install you must:

1. Unzip and then copy the entire imaguard folder into your wp-content/plugins (if installing via Wordpress plugin direct installation, skip this step)
2. Make sure you have WP permalinks enabled at this stage. If not you must enable it. Imaguard will not be able to correctly redirect offsite / none whitelisted visitors without WP permalinks enabled.
3. Go to your wp-admin dashboard and select plugins. You will see Imaguard on the list. Click 'activate'.
4. Under Settings you will now have a menu option called Imaguard. Open it and make sure you don't have any errors showing on top. Two potential errors may be displayed here. You may see a missing WP permalink error (see above). Follow the steps to activate WP permalinks and then deactivate and reactivate the Imaguard plugin. Or you may see an error stating that Imaguard was unable to update your htaccess file. This usually means that the file permissions for your .htaccess file (in the WP root folder) are incorrect. Either change the file permissions to chmod 666 or make sure that the webserver user has read rights (the latter is recommended). If changing to chmod 666 you may want to make a note of your old chmod settings and change back after completing the Imaguard setup.
5. That is it. If you go via links on your site to any image, your site will be the referrer and the image will show normally. If you try to open an image directly, though, it will redirect and show the image inside your normal layout. NB! Your browser may cache image files so when testing the application it may initially seem not to work. Either clear your cache, add '?anything' after the image name (e.g. 'test.jpg?123') to force your browser to reload the file, or open a new private browser session and test again.

Note: This plugin requires the GD Library which is usually installed with PHP5 in order for the text-over-image functions to work. Note: If you use a WP cache plugin, you should refresh your cache both after installing Imaguard and after deactivating Imaguard.

1.0

• First release

1.2 Added user agent whitelist Added text over image option Fixed bug in htaccess regeneration 1.3 Fixed problem with tickbox jQuery CSS popup on some browsers (endless loading problem) Fixed 500 error issue with certain characters on user agent list Added optional credit line to watermark. Remove by unchecking in settings Amended deactivation tag to better remove htaccess footprint when deactivated Added option to set redirect type 301 or 302 Added option to set font size Added option to set vertical text position Added option to set degree of darkness to add to images in aggressive mode Added onward forward to image post instead of image preview page (note: this is still in beta mode) 1.3.2 Fixed a bug related to the show in post Beta function 1.3.3 Bug fix to keep compatibility with WP 3.8.1