Converting Hotlinks to Real Links?

[ichthyous]

Hi there, I have a website which contains primarily visual content and so it attracts its fair share of hotlinkers. I was wondering if there is a way to take advantage of this by swapping out the image for my site's url when people try to hotlink to it? Or perhaps another idea would be to allow the image to show, but with a live link to my site posted underneath? Is something like that possible? Thanks!

[g1smd]

That's always possible, and there are at least several ways that it can be done.

It will still use up your bandwidth to serve some alternative image.

[jdMorgan]

Possible: swapping out the image for my site's url when people try to hotlink to it
Not possible: but with a live link to my site posted underneath?

The second option isn't generally possible, because the "replacement object" would have to be an HTML file. However, since the image is being included on the hotlinker's page by an <img src="xyz.gif"> tag, the browser won't accept an HTML page when it's looking for an image.

Either make a replacement image that looks OK when scaled to any reasonable size in portrait or landscape mode and shows the URL of your site, or simply deny access with a 403-Forbidden and be done with it.

The secondary problem is that the URL in the replacement image won't be clickable -- The viewer will have to type it in.

Jim

[ichthyous]

Thanks for the quick response! I'm so disappointed...I was hoping to accumulate thousands of new links with virtually no labor! It would be worth the bandwidth loss if backlinks were the reward. Thanks again!