Auto Destroyable Image or Picture File

The best thing is to give your image a watermark, make it slightly lower resolution, maybe give it some art effects and/or some random lines across the pictures.

prasmin,

Currently, no such thing exists. There have been some attempts in the past to do something similar with email, with mixed results (however, read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/21crypto.html?_r=2&ref=science).

For NON-visible watermarking, you might want to take a look at Digimarc: https://www.digimarc.com/solutions/images_pro.asp

Cheers,
LHerrou

The inherent flaw is this....

You can protect the image using DRM (encrypt it and only send the key to persons that you like to send it to)
If the key is timelimited it cannot be extracted (well if you can change time => set comuter to a different date) it can still be done.
The image cannot be previewed and when the intended receipient has to make a decrypted copy and store that to be able to use it... => now there exists an clear copy of your image...

So what you need to develop is an eco-system, like apple did with iTunes (guess why the removed DRM nowadays), and others.

The eco-system should be eble to preview images, only decrypt when a reliable timesource is available, and only in memory so you need to provide a photoshop like funtions to merge your image with different images etc.

Just like they did for HD tv. There you cannot view HD unless the Monitor; all cabling; the video adapters, records etc; all software involved etc; all media involved. and all transmision channels match with exchange of certificates.

So if you still want to go that road you now have an indication of what to do globaly.
Personaly I thing the sensible way is to make sure that you can recognize you images if used, fingerprinting & watermarking them.

As everyone has said, there is not a way to make an image or picturefile destroyable.
However, there are some ways to simulate such effect, with limitations.

1. You need to protect the picture, for example Watermarking.
2. You need to encapsulate the picture so you can only see it in a predefined way, in order to do this, you could create your own encapsulation containing the viewer, or user an external viewer. The easiest way would be to encapsulate it in a format like PDF, where you can protect the picture with a certificate and set an expiration date.

In this way, the PDF will be viewable by the duration of the certificate, the picture could be copied (via screen capture or so) , but it is watermarked, so you could track it for authoring rights.

As many have suggested creating a self destroyable image file is somewhat pointless because the end user can use the print screen button to take a snapshot of the image as it is currently displayed then save it in an unencumbered file format.

You would have to start by writing a picture viewing program that overrides the printscreen button....which shouldn't be hard too do on windows:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/133059.html

Then you could have the program encypt the photos that you want to distribute...and hide the key in the program to decrypt the image files while the end user views them.