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).