The short answer is no. No they can't. If they want something of yours they can get it or know someone that can.

This comes up quite often actually with our clients and we tell them the same thing. Sure there are deterrents which I'll describe below however that's all they are.

Here's a great story for you:

After a year or so telling our client that you can't lock down your photos so no one steals them, they came to me one day and said: "Rob, I know you said there's nothing that can be done about image theft but a good friend we know with a website portfolio was able to protect his images, no one can lift them from his site."

I said: "really?" (sarcastically) "Give me 30 minutes."

In no time, I was able to obtain all of the "locked down" images, place an impromptu logo watermarked on each one and post it on our site to view in a fancy Flash gallery.

Client's response: "Oh, I guess you were right."

That being said, for the average Joe there are some things you can do to irritate thieves:

• You can graphically watermark the image in Photoshop (hate this as it detracts from the photo)

• You can obtain real-deal watermark software here this is actually found under the filters menu in Photoshop that no one uses. The filter in Photoshop is just a demo but you can purchase it, pricing runs around $200/yr for 3000 images. This embeds trackable code into the image used on the web.

• Invisible overlayed images can help. What you do is create a table cell in DreamWeaver, set the real image to "background image" and insert a transparent gif on top of that background. If they try to drag the image to their desktop all they will get is the transparent gif.

• Disabling print screen, screen capture or right click functionality can be done with scripts found on the web.

• Last thing you can do for the idiotic theif that hotllinks to your images right on your site, you can tweak the htaccess code to reveal a message on their end like: I steal all of my images from effusiondesign.com" David Airey wrote about the code tweak here.

Bottom line guys is, if they can see it, they can get it. Even if you have all the deterrents in place above, the image has been downloaded to the users computer in the cache anyway. Do what you can for the every day weekend warrior thieves, however the mission impossible guys will always be able to get what they want.