Selective Image Guard | A deterrent for unauthorized downloads and scraping vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

Selective Image Guard is a lightweight WordPress plugin that adds multiple layers of protection to your website’s images. It’s ideal for photographers, designers, and content creators who want to deter theft and unauthorized use of their visual content. Key Features Desktop Screenshot Prevention: Applies a blur filter to protected images when specific keyboard shortcuts for screenshots are detected. This is a deterrent, not a foolproof solution. Print Protection: Blurs protected images when a user attempts to print the page. Selective Protection: You control which images are protected. The plugin only affects images you mark as protected in the media library. How It Works Navigate to your media library and select the image you want to protect. Check the “Protect this image” option. The plugin will automatically apply front-end protections to the selected image to help prevent unauthorized access. Free Features The free version gives you solid protection against common image theft techniques: DevTools Detection – Prevents users from opening browser developer tools to inspect and steal images. JavaScript Disabling Detection – Detects when JavaScript is disabled, ensuring protections remain active. Desktop Screenshot Prevention – Blocks most attempts to capture screenshots of your images on desktop. Print Protection – Prevents printing of protected images directly from the browser. PRO Features The PRO version unlocks advanced and flexible controls for complete image protection: Bulk Protection – Quickly apply protection to all images across your website with a single setting. Featured Images Protection – Protects your WordPress featured images from theft. Protection by Post Type – Apply image protection only where you need it (e.g., posts, pages, custom post types). WooCommerce Product Galleries – Keep your product images safe and protect your online shop from unauthorized copying. Watermark – Automatically add a customizable watermark to your images for extra security. Premium Support – Get direct, priority support from the plugin author. Don’t understimate the value of a deterrent. This plugin provides a deterrent, not a foolproof solution. No client-side technique can offer 100% protection against a determined attacker. But don’t underestimate the value of a deterrent. Think about the methods used to keep mosquitoes away. Even if they don’t work 100%, would you rather be surrounded by hundreds of mosquitoes or just a couple? That’s the idea of a deterrent. Examples of Use Here are several examples where you would want to display an image on a site but discourage people from sharing it: Online course slides – You want students to see diagrams or infographics, but not download or redistribute them outside your platform. Stock photography previews – You show high-resolution images to logged-in subscribers, but do not want those same images shared publicly without a license. Members-only content – For example, fitness programs or meal plans with recipe cards as images, visible only to paying members. Confidential documents – An internal portal where staff see charts or scanned reports, but you do not want them forwarded outside the company. Product prototypes – Showing early design mockups (e.g. fashion sketches or unreleased product photos) to investors or testers, but preventing leaks to competitors. Protection against unauthorized scraping – Preventing automated bots from copying images and republishing them without permission. E-commerce product photos – Protecting your catalog from competitors scraping product images to use in their own stores. Real estate listings – Preventing property photos from being scraped and reused on unauthorized portals. Artistic portfolios – Protecting photographers, illustrators, and designers from having their portfolio images scraped and reused without attribution. News and media outlets – Protecting journalistic images from being scraped and re-hosted by content farms. Stock agencies – Protecting preview images (with or without watermarks) from being scraped in bulk to avoid licensing. Recipe or DIY blogs – Protecting step-by-step photos from being scraped and republished elsewhere. More Information About Image Protection For more details about image protection and the limitations of client-side techniques, read the article: How to Protect Images on WordPress (And How to Prevent Theft) Credits Developed by Jose Mortellaro

Compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load automatically with the powerful Smush image optimizer to keep your WordPress site fast, without losing quality. Smush makes it easy to optimize images, compress images, and deliver images faster across your entire WordPress site. This all-in-one image optimizer automatically reduces image file sizes, enables image lazy load, and serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF, all without breaking image quality or adding extra work. Whether you’re running a blog, store, or portfolio, Smush helps you optimize images at scale and keep your site fast with a trusted WordPress image optimizer. Trusted by 1+ Million Sites | 4.8/5 Star Rating Get everything you need to optimize images and speed up your site. Smush works out of the box with no complicated setup – just install and let it handle the rest. Compress images without losing quality Reduce image file size automatically while keeping your images sharp and clear. Smush is an easy-to-use image optimizer which let’s you compress images using both lossless and lossy compression, giving you the best balance of quality and performance without extra work. You can also compress images outside the media library using Directory Smush, making it easy to optimize images stored in theme folders, plugins, or other directories on your server. Lazy load images for faster pages Enable image lazy load across your site so images load only when needed. This image optimizer improves initial page speed and creates a smoother experience for visitors without extra configuration. Serve WebP and AVIF images automatically (PRO) Convert images to WebP and AVIF and serve them automatically to supported browsers. Smush helps you optimize images using next-gen formats to reduce file size and improve load times across your WordPress site. Deliver images faster with an Image CDN (PRO) Serve images through a global image CDN to reduce latency and improve load times for visitors around the world. 119 global CDN servers Up to 500 GB of bandwidth Faster image delivery based on visitor location Improved performance for image-heavy and high-traffic sites Automatically resize and fix image dimensions (PRO) Eliminate common PageSpeed warnings and improve layout stability with automatic image sizing. Smush dynamically resizes images to perfectly fit their containers, regardless of original size, helping fix the “Properly size images” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. It also automatically adds missing width and height attributes to your images, improving rendering speed and reducing layout shifts. This helps you meet the “Ensure images have explicit width and height” recommendation without any manual work. Optimize your entire site, automatically Smush works across your whole site as a powerful image optimizer to optimize images as you upload them and maintain performance over time without manual work. Optimize images automatically on upload Compress images in bulk or individually Works with your existing media library No need to re-upload images Enable image lazy load across your site Convert images to WebP and AVIF Deliver images with an integrated image CDN Automatically resize and serve correctly sized images Optimize images outside the media library with Directory Smush Built for performance Smush improves page speed and overall performance by reducing image weight and improving how images are delivered. Reduce page load times Improve user experience Better performance for image-heavy pages Supports image lazy load and preload images (PRO) for faster perceived performance Works with your existing setup Smush is built to work with your current WordPress setup, including popular themes, page builders, and plugins. Compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, and more Works with WooCommerce stores No need to change your workflow Easy to enable and configure Designed to be simple You don’t need to be a performance expert to optimize images with Smush image optimizer. Works out of the box Simple settings when you need them No technical knowledge required Safe to use on any site Why choose Smush? There are plenty of image optimization plugins, but Smush focuses on making it easy to optimize images, compress images, and improve performance without complexity. As a leading WordPress image optimizer, Smush gives you powerful optimization tools without the technical hassle. Trusted by over 1 million WordPress users Built specifically for WordPress Regular updates and improvements Backed by the WPMU DEV team Get started in minutes Install Smush, activate it, and start to compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load right away. This easy-to-use image optimizer helps most sites see improvements immediately without changing how they upload or manage images. About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Learn more here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you! Contact and Credits Originally written by Alex Dunae at Dialect (dialect.ca, e-mail ‘alex’ at ‘dialect dot ca’), 2008-11.