RobArt Image Guard

Every image you publish is, the moment it loads, a full-resolution file sitting on a public server — free for anyone, and any automated scraper, to take. Image Guard changes that. Your original master is moved to a private store the public web can’t reach; visitors are served a controlled, resolution-limited copy through a signed delivery endpoint, so your page source never contains a link to your real file. Automated bulk harvesting — the cause of most real-world image theft — simply fails.

Image Guard is honest about what it can and can’t do. No software can make an image on a screen impossible to capture (a screenshot always works), and Image Guard never pretends otherwise. What it does is keep your high-resolution master genuinely private, make casual and automated copying fail, and give you a real evidence trail for the rare deliberate theft that gets through.

Watch the walkthrough

What you get

• Private master, controlled copy. Your original is moved to a private store you choose during setup — a folder outside your public website is recommended, where no web address can reach it at all; the public only ever receives a placeholder that a small script swaps for a resolution-limited copy at runtime. The master URL never appears on the page.
• Bulk scraping fails. Automated bots that harvest whole catalogues collect placeholders, not your originals — the economics of scraping at scale stop working.
• WooCommerce and page builders. Protection works across WooCommerce product galleries (main image, thumbnails, click-to-enlarge, hover-zoom) and page builders such as Elementor (galleries, carousels, lightboxes).
• Right-click deterrent. Optionally suppress the right-click menu on protected images and swap in a “protected” card, so a casual save grabs nothing useful.
• Nothing real is public. By default a protected image publishes only the grey placeholder — no usable copy of your work is exposed, so it can’t be scraped from the page. Your master stays private either way.
• Search previews (Pro). If you want a protected image to still appear in image search, Pro lets you publish a small, heavily watermarked “search preview” per image — a deliberate trade-off, described as licensable to search engines. The free plugin keeps every image at maximum protection.
• Watermarks. Bake a visible text or logo watermark into what’s delivered. (An optional invisible forensic mark for traceability is a Pro feature.)
• Copyright data (Pro). Embed your copyright into the image’s own metadata (readable, signed and tamper-evident, or encrypted), including a full IPTC/XMP metadata editor.
• Evidence certificate (Pro). Generate a printable certificate recording your claim and a cryptographic fingerprint of your original, captured at protection time.
• Find and prove infringement (Pro). Drop an image you found in the wild and Image Guard checks it against your protected originals, then helps you build a dated evidence record for a takedown or claim.

Who it’s for

Photographers, illustrators, artists, designers, and shop owners — anyone who publishes images they’d rather not hand out at full resolution to every scraper on the web, and who wants a genuine evidence trail if a copy turns up.

Free and Pro

Image Guard is free and fully usable on its own. The free plugin gives you the complete protection pipeline — moving your master to a private store, serving controlled reduced-resolution copies through a signed endpoint, a visible text or logo watermark, the right-click deterrent, and WooCommerce and page-builder support. Every protected image is kept at maximum protection: only the grey placeholder is public. An optional Pro upgrade adds the per-image search previews (publish a small, watermarked crawlable copy so a work can still appear in image search), the IPTC/XMP copyright-metadata editor, the invisible forensic mark, the evidence certificate, the Verify tool (drop a found image to check it against your protected originals), bulk protection (up to ten images at a time in a review carousel), and auto-protection of new uploads.

Uninstall

Image Guard cleans up after itself. When you delete the plugin from the Plugins screen (if you have enabled “Remove data on uninstall” in Settings) it removes everything it created: its settings and options, its cached licence-tier value, the private master store (your protected originals), the placeholder images it generated, and the now-empty Media Library entries for those placeholders. Deactivating keeps everything; only deleting runs the clean-up. This does not restore your originals to the Media Library first, so unprotect any images you want to keep before deleting, and always keep your own copies of your originals.

External services

Image Guard does its protection, watermarking, metadata and evidence work locally on your own server — it serves images from your site and makes no analytics or tracking requests anywhere.

Two features contact outside services, and only when you choose to use them:

• Verified timestamps (optional). If you ask for a verified timestamp on your copyright metadata or certificate, Image Guard requests a signed timestamp token from a public RFC 3161 Timestamping Authority (TSA) you configure. Only a cryptographic hash of your claim is sent — never your image. If the TSA can’t be reached, it falls back to a local timestamp rather than failing.
• Pro licensing (optional). If you enter a Pro licence key to upgrade, the key is validated against the licensing service. This happens only when you activate or check a licence; the free plugin makes no such request.

The plugin also makes one local self-check when you choose a private-store location: it writes a small probe file into that folder and requests it back through your own site’s URL, purely to confirm the folder is not publicly reachable. This request goes only to your own site — no third party is contacted, and no personal data is sent. It runs only when you set or change the store location.