This issue comes up fairly often because of artists' desire to protect their copyrighted images.  Sites that disable the right-click function can SEEM, on the surface, to prevent people from downloading images and saving them to their hard drive.  Of course, for anyone who really wants the images, it is a piece of cake to get around the right-click disablers.  Just go into your temporary internet files folder, find the image you want, copy it, paste it, rename it and voila!  you've got the image.  Or how about this method?  Hit the PrintScreen button (upper right on most keyboards), open an image editing program, start a new images, click edit/paste and you now have the screen capture as an image, just crop out anything you don't want and AGAIN, you have the image.

Here is the reason I bring this up.  Occassionally, artists want me to install a right click disabler ANYWAY.  I think it's a bad idea.  It generates a completely false sense of security.  AND more importantly right-click disablers are ANNOYING to many browsers.

For example, when I browser and want to go "back", I just hit the right-mouse button and click "back" from the popup menu.  It's much easier to me than navigating around the screen to click back.  I find it faster, more efficient and it doesn't aggravate my carpal tunnel as much.  I suspect I'm not alone.

So here's the bottom line of today's little rant:

Why penalize the whole world with a right-click disabler on your site when the people who it is intended to stop know how to get around it anyway?

That's my view, post a comment below to send me yours.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic

PS:  A better method to "protect" your images is to WATERMARK them in the original image.  It has the downside of obscuring part of the image and is a lot more work.  The best method is to realize that web-quality images cannot be used to create high-quality prints.  So the best a downloader can do is create a post card from your image.  My suggestion would be instead of FIGHTING it to ENCOURAGE it.  Just make it clear that any downloaded image used MUST include your name, a copyright notice, and your web site address THEN you might actually benefit from the 99.9% of downloads that are innocent.