Tiff viewing

[fmrock]

Hey Everyone,

Not sure if anyone has come across this but thought I would ask here.

We are working on a project and need the ability to view multi page TIff files in the web browser. These are medical images, so we can not allow the user to print, save, ect... only view and click though the pages.

I have googled and found a few items that may work for us, but not sure if anyone has any experince with this.

Thanks for any advice you may have.

 

[Sheco]

A web user can only view data that has been sent to his or her machine.

If the data is sent to a machine, it is always possible to save it.

Therefore, it is possible to save a copy of anything you can view.

All you can hope to do is make it more DIFFICULT for the average computer user. A computer programmer will always find a way to take whatever data he wants.


Anyway, I had the same problem you describe about 6 years ago. The difference was the TIFF images were technically public records so, although my client preferred to SELL a "certified copy" to the user, it wasnt the end of the world if some hacker person decided to save "free" copies.

There were two parts of the solution:
1. I used a big overlay watermark that said something like "NOT CERTIFIED" it was big enough to notice but not dark enough to be distracting.
2. I used a Java applet to display the images because browsers dont support TIFF and also it was easy to strip the "Save As" button off the interface so as to make it very difficult for anyone other than a programmer to get at the data stream. The applet had no internal cache so it did not write the images to disk which is a plus if you want to make it difficult to bogard but is a negative when the user tries to flip through a multi-page document. Another down-side was that any user had to download the Java TIFF viewer program and, at least back then, some users even had to download the Java Virtual Machine.

 

[fmrock]

Thanks for your response Sheco,

There are some .net solutions out there, and black ice sdk has an active x we can use.

Still doing some research, on different stuff.

We have also considered converting the tiffs to PDF files, but not sure if that idea is any better. The end user will have to have the reader also....

We basicly wanted to embed the image in the webpage, and then have some text area boxs for the end user to comment on the image and store that back in the database.

 

[travisbrown]

Converting to PDF won't help - that just makes it easier. Like Sheco said - if it's on the screen, it's been downloaded to the user's computer. Anyone determinied enough can save/print/copy.

Flash is pretty good at deterring printing, saving and copying. Nothing can stop a screenshot, though.

 

[ESquared]

The only thing that could stop a screenshot is some kind of video overlay/transparency thing that reports the "wrong" pixels to the screenshot. But that would probably either be a bug or a hardware thing...

One way that we are hiding the tiff is by embedding the web page in another application so it's not apparent that it IS a web page. Then, by disabling all the right-clicking and other things it's much harder for the user to get access to the images. An additional problem, though, is that anything viewed in the browser will show in the history, even an embedded browser.

Sheco, do you have a copy of that java applet? I've been trying to build my own but having problems with it finding my libraries... sigh.

The solution I used for now, just to get the project out (it's internal to the company) is to convert to a jpg on the server. I hate it, but until I get something better, at least it works.

[COLOR=#aa88aa black]Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.[/color]

 

[Sheco]

I wish I still had a copy but it was a long time ago, before the Bush v. Gore election in 2000.

Anyway, shat if, instead of embedding the browser, you use the XMLHTTP object to pull the image? I imagine it would show up in the browser cache but maybe not in the history.