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.

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

Denser grids, WebP/PNG atlas formats, fully customizable watermark and IPTC text, invisible forensic (LSB) watermarking, and configurable token validity are available in Bender Pro, a separate plugin distributed outside WordPress.org.