Protect your images from scrapers, hotlinking, and theft with mosaic tiling, watermarking, and IPTC copyright metadata — without hurting SEO or speed.

Bender – Mosaic Image Protection

<p>Your WordPress images travel as a mosaic. Whoever steals them finds only shuffled tiles.</p>
<p>Bender protects your site&#8217;s photos from scrapers, AI training bots, and outright theft, without touching SEO, speed, or the experience of your human visitors.</p>
<h4>How it works</h4>
<p>On upload (or from the Media Library), Bender automatically generates two derivatives for every image:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Mosaic atlas</strong> – the image in full resolution, with an N×N grid permuted and flipped via HMAC-SHA256 <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Fisher-Yates using a per-image secret key. A single CDN-cacheable file: downloaded as-is, it&#8217;s an unreadable puzzle.</li>
<li><strong>Signed low-res</strong> – a reduced version with a visible diagonal watermark and IPTC copyright metadata (read by Google Images), used as the <code>&lt;img&gt;</code> source: SEO, social previews, and the no-JavaScript fallback.</li>
</ol>
<p>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 <code>&lt;canvas&gt;</code> with a blur-up cross-fade.</p>
<h4>What it blocks (and what it honestly doesn&#8217;t)</h4>
<ul>
<li>HTML scrapers / mass bots — blocked: the HTML only contains the watermarked low-res</li>
<li>Right-click &#8220;Save image&#8221; — blocked: the canvas isn&#8217;t a file</li>
<li>Hi-res hotlinking — blocked: no plain hi-res URL exists</li>
<li>Downloading the atlas — useless: permuted, flipped tiles, no map</li>
<li>Map enumeration via REST — mitigated: time-limited HMAC token, per-IP rate limiting</li>
<li>Screenshots — not blockable, by any technology</li>
</ul>
<p>That&#8217;s why Bender always signs, not just hides: visible watermarking and IPTC metadata make authorship provable even when a copy slips through.</p>
<h4>What&#8217;s included</h4>
<p>This plugin is fully functional as-is, with no locked or restricted features:</p>
<ul>
<li>Automatic protection on upload, unlimited images</li>
<li>6×6 mosaic grid</li>
<li>Visible &#8220;Bender™&#8221; watermark</li>
<li>Default IPTC copyright metadata</li>
<li>JPEG atlas format</li>
<li>Bulk protect/unprotect from the Media Library, with a protection status column and filter</li>
</ul>
<p>Denser grids, WebP/PNG atlas formats, fully customizable watermark and IPTC text, invisible forensic (LSB) watermarking, and configurable token validity are available in <strong>Bender Pro</strong>, 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).</p>


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