Researching Stolen Images

stolen images

[ControlZ]

I am wondering how I can locate people/sites that are stealing images that are copywrited? I know I can view the server logs, but the site in question receives 100,000 requests every few days -- this is killer on the eyes, even using notepad, large text and search.

Tried an image search on several search engines, but if the person renamed the image or even if they didn't, it won't always turn up. For example Google usually indexes image names by the text surrounding them.

I once saw a command you could type into a browser that would show you all sites linking to yours.

Any suggestions? Are there any free files that filter log files and search for certain words?

Has anyone used the robots.txt file to stop search engines from using your images in an image search?

[Longhaired Genius]

If the problem is people hotlinking images from your server, then blocking them with an .htaccess file is the way to go. Here are some Webmaster World threads that helped me learn how to do it.

[webmasterworld.com...]
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[victor]

Check your stats package to see if it'll report spongers

Find who links to you:

link:www.my-site.tld

Do it in several search engines for a complete list. Syntax may vary.

Stop search engines indexing your images: update your robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

stops Googlebot

If all your images are in a small set of folders that don't contain stuff you do want indexed:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /other-images/

etc