Hi, I have noticed that it is to easy to bypass the watermark protection of the images by accessing the original photos. For example if the path to a photo is like:

http:///index.php?album=psiliamos&image=P1010467.JPG

you just have to enter the following address to access the original photo:
http:///albums/psiliamos/P1010467.JPG

the path and the filename are easily recognizable from the orig URL.

Maybe it would be nice to have an option or plugin that replaces the original photos with the watermarked photos (from the cache folder)?

Please do some legwork. This subject has come up on the forum multiple times. There are means for protecting the albums folder.

Just FYI, Zenphoto prefers not to alter original images. There is only one case where it does, and that is a plugin--the filter-crop_image add-on. It certainly would be posible to create a filter which applied the watermark to the original, but we will probably not do that. Watermarks currently can be taylored differently for images, thumbnails, whole albums, and even individual images.

That is pretty hard to do if applying the watemark to the original.

It is also quite possible for you to apply a watermark to the image before you upload it.

To further add the reason the originals are not changed is flexibility. That way you can change image sizes on your site without the need of reuploading!

If you wish to protect your full images from direct access do this using htaccess and the right file/folder permissions on the server side.