Since 1.1.0, Patreon WordPress offers a nifty way to lock your images and send your visitors to become your patrons if they click on the image. With 1.1.1, we will have an option to turn this feature on and off.
Highlights of this feature are:
- Allows you to post patron only images with beautiful interfaces
- Visually appealing way to present graphical patron-only content like comics and other visuals
- Automatically blurs locked images and creates unlock interface with $ pledge level
- You can lock images inside unlocked posts
- You can put multiple locked images with different $ levels into the same post
- Protects your images on site and off site. Prevents hotlinking of locked images. Any non locked image can be hotlinked
- Protects your images even when directly viewed by image link from a browser or any other app in any device
- Automatically sends your visitors to pledge flow to become your patrons if they click on the image
- You can lock any previously existing image in your media library or images that you are going to post
To turn this feature on, please visit your plugin settings at your WP admin -> Patreon Settings:
Checking the checkbox for image feature and saving options enables the image locking feature.
When you enable this feature, you can lock any existing or future images in your WordPress library easily. There are two ways of doing that:
1 - Inside post editor, when embedding images in visual mode
When you select and embed an image and then click on it, or click on an already embedded image, two toolbars should show up. One of them is the default WordPress image toolbar, and the one with Patreon logo is the one you should click on to launch the locking option for that image.
When you click on the icon, you will see below interface:
Putting in any value and clicking update will save the value you set for locking that image. After that, that particular image will be locked everywhere in your site, and will require being a patron with the pledge level you set in order to view it.
If you set 0, or delete the value and update, the image will be unlocked.
2 - Alternatively, you can lo:ck images through your media library
When you click on any image in your media library and bring its properties up, you should see the input for setting a pledge level for locking the image.
Entering a $ level will update that image’s pledge level and lock the image. Again, setting 0 or empty, will unlock it.
Tips:
- Entering any $ level to an existing image will lock it across your entire site for that value. Even if you posted the image in multiple posts or pages
- If you set a $5 value for an image and put it inside a post for which you set $1 level and locked, a $1 patron will be able to view the post, but not the image. Only a $5 patron will be able to view both the post and the image
- If you disable the image locking feature, or you uninstall the plugin, all your previously locked images will become public and visible by non patrons
- Turn the image locking feature off if you are not using it, in order to save server resources
