Monday, October 27, 2008

Disabling the Image Toolbar in IE 6+

To disable the image toolbar for a particular page on your website, simply add the following META tag to the HEAD section of your HTML document:

< meta_equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">

The "no" setting disallows the toolbar.

Disabling the Toolbar on an Image by Image Basis

If you only want to prevent the toolbar from appearing for certain graphics on your page, you can disable it on an image by image basis.

For example, if you have a picture called "proprietary.gif", you can add a GALLERYIMG attribute to the image tag that you used to display it:

< img_src="proprietary.gif" galleryimg="no">

The "no" prevents the toolbar from showing. Setting it to "yes" allows the toolbar, and is useful if you have set the entire page to default to not showing the toolbar, and only want to enable it on an image by image basis.

Limitations

Note that disabling the image toolbar does not actually prevent visitors from saving your images, sending them to others or printing them. It merely disables the toolbar. Period. It is not a solution to theft of your graphics. Visitors can still right click the mouse on your pictures and save them from the right click menu, or save the entire page with all the images to their disk, etc (the list of ways to do this is very long). However, it is still useful for people who prefer not to have the toolbar pop out on the pictures appearing on their website. In fact, judging by the response of one very irritated IE user, who called the toolbar "that stupid IE image popup", you may even be doing your visitors a service.

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