Is it safe to protect the images only with a watermark image style? I'm building a website for selling stock photography and I'm looking for a way to protect the images. Here's what I'm using right now:


Imagecache Actions to watermark photos
Private file system for uploading all images
The images are displayed on the front only through image styles with watermarking.


Question: is this enough and are there any ways users could bypass this (e.g. by directly trying to access certain image style)?

Thanks!
This is probably not as secure as you would like it to be.
Basically if a user has access to view the image they can view any derivative image (image style), so long as they can work out the url to that derivative.

There is a module image style access that allows you to set up access rules per image style.

That should give you the extra protection you need.