No way to redirect direct linking to images?

[maccas]

I am not talking about hotlinking but rather someone linking directly to image.gif. Is there nothing that can be done apart from just renaming the image?

[maccas]

Never mind, just had my .htaccess in the wrong folder *idiot*, I just presumed you couldn't redirect a image request to a html page.

[jdMorgan]

Well, you can't reliably redirect an image request to an html page, because the browser loads pages and images in different ways. If an image URL is typed-in, then you can redirect it to an HTML page, but if the image URL is requested based on an <img> tag on an HTML page, then you can't -- the browser won't handle it properly because the <img> tag processing does not support/expect a MIME-type of text/html for an image request response.

You might also want to check out this current thread [webmasterworld.com] for a cautionary tale about blocking blank referrers.

Jim

[maccas]

Thanks jdMorgan, it's just a simple <a href="http:// mysite/images/mypic.gif">my pic</a> link, I know it isn't going to be 100% but this seems to work fine.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_referer} ^http://(www\.)?theirsite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http:// mysite/folder/file.html [R=301,L]

I know hotlinking to a image can't be redirected to a html page, darn it.

[jdMorgan]

Yes that should work as long as the client provides a referrer header. If not, there's not much that can be done... :(

Jim

[maccas]

Thanks, how could I get it to redirect based on request_uri? I tried the following

Rewritecond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/image1\.gif [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_referer} ^http://(www\.)?website1\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_referer} ^http://(www\.)?website2\.co.uk [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_referer} ^http://(www\.)?website3\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http:// mysite/file.html [R=301,L]

But it doesn't work, if someone requests image2 it also gets redirected to mysite/file.html

[jdMorgan]

The "!" in the first RewriteCond means "NOT". So this code redirects every URL except image1 to your HTML file. It sounds like that is not what you want.

Jim

[maccas]

Thanks again, I thought I already tried without it. Works a treat.