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Dealing with Deep-Linking to Your Online Photos?

Posted by Cliff on from the content-snagging dept.

Pig Hogger asks: "I've had my own hobby website since 1993, and over the years it has expanded to be quite a reference for the domain I am covering (some pro websites list it as additional reference, and so does Wikipedia. Google page-ranks it amongst the top). Every so often, I peruse the logs, most especially looking at the referrers to see where people come from, and once in a while, I notice that some webloggers deep-link to an image on my site. I do not mind too much when it's on-topic, but when it's not *AND* it's sucking-up bandwidth, I tend to be irked. Or worse, when you can't go look at the referring page without registering on the weblog site. In those cases, I change the picture filename (and the corresponding webpage that calls it), and I substitute a smaller (and most often, naughty) picture. What other tricks those of you are facing the same problem have to address this problem?"

2 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Here's what I did by Sentry21 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have a file called bestgif.gif on my website - simply put, the best gif ever. Then Mexicans started putting it in their sig on these huge forums, and my bandwidth went up near a few gigs a month (from almost nothing). So...

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://pkpidgeot.com/.*$ [NC]
    RewriteRule .*bestgif\.gif$ http://sites.darien.ca/temp/.tubgirl.jpg [R,NC]

    I'm willing to bet their accounts got suspended when suddenly their sigs contained a large picture of a large woman spewing a fountain of shit into the air.

    My bandwidth usage drops off completely soon after I add a site to the list.

  2. A better way to do it by Rameriez · · Score: 5, Informative

    I had this exact same problem with a few images I host on my site. Typically from forums that allow avatars to be hosted offsite. I did a bit of a google on the problem of "hot linking", and came up with this:

    http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/

    It's an excellent solution that prevents hot/deep image embedding, but allows for normal anchor links to your pictures. You'll need to be hosting on an apache server and be allowed to use .htaccess files and have mod_rewrite, plus the tiniest amount of php/perl scripting knowledge (php example in link).

    Basically, you rewrite any requests for images from offsite with a URL that points to a script. Embedded images will fail, because the browser expects image data when it gets text/html instead. The script simply displays the image, perhaps puts a credit in, and a link back to your site.

    This way, you can block most people from stealing your bandwidth by embedding your images in their pages, but not prevent less-harmful linking.