jd01 - 11:59 pm on Nov 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

You could get creative...

Since you are on a dedicated server, you could create independent sub-domains to host your images; One for each category.

Then use your file system mapping to get the images from the correct location through your current directory structure, or point the sub-domain to the correct location on your server, depending on what type of control panel (if any) you are using.

That way if some images are hot linked and the files from that sub-domain are filtered, the sub-domains which contain images that are not hot linked should be fine and show in the Image Results.

EG

<img scr="http://HotLinkedImages.example.com/the-image.gif" />

<img scr="http://NotPopularImages1.example.com/the-image.gif" />

<img scr="http://NotPopularImages2.example.com/the-image.gif" />

If you can create and point sub-domains to directories in your main domain directory structure using your hosting software, it should be fairly easy.

If not you should be able to accomplish the mapping with mod_rewrite...
If you decide to go this route, the discussion should probably continue in the Apache Forum [webmasterworld.com].

Justin

<aside>
Using sub-domains for loading some of your images will actually speed up your site load time, because it forces browsers to open secondary connections... A browser will generally only open 2 connections to a site, but using a sub-domain 'counts' as a new site and 2 more connections will be opened to load the images. I often use this technique to speed the load time of sites with large images.
</aside>