Protecting original images (D7, watermark, imagecache) My goal is to have watermarked images and protected originals for a node image field in D7.

How to add a watermark to images has already been explained: add watermark to all images uploaded in the site

What I'm missing is how to protect the original images! These are still available via direct url.

Someone solved the problem for D5: http://drupal.org/node/424068 but the mentioned rights are not present in D7 anymore.

An other approach is presented in the comments of this page: http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/file


Create a private filesystem
Change the field's filesystem to the private one
Use the content access module to protect the node (a), or
create a custom module and use the file_download() hook to prevent access (b).


Possibility (a) doesn't work for me as I don't want to protect the access to nodes, but only to the plain original image files. Possibility (b) hides the imagecached images as well.
You can try using an .htaccess to protect the directory containing the original images as mentioned at http://drupal.org/node/424068#comment-3149994