Google images taking my bandwidth

[Aleister]

I have been reading up on various methods of blocking hot-linking. My web host actually has an option to block it completely, but I would still like to be able to allow hot-linking sometimes (primarily so I can have forum avatars, and certain banners on my server up on different sites).

So my question is this. Is it possible to modify my .htaccess to do the following :

1) Block hot-linking of all subdirectories (so I don't have to have the .htaccess in every directory of images I have).

2) Have 1 particular directory that does allow hot-linking (where I will put the images I want to allow it with).

Thanks!

[Krapulator]

If it's mostly Google images causing you problems, you could just shut them out with robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

[Aleister]

Looking through my logs last night I found that Google is only a small part of it. Most of it is people using 200+ KB images as their avatars in forums, which appear on thousands of their posts, which are fairly used forums so they get downloaded constantly. Several image galleries are also using them.

[Reflect]

Why not use this to your advantage? If you sell items swap the image and put a layer in it using PS with your domain name/URL?

Just a tought, take a negative and make it a positive.

Take care,

Brian

[Aleister]

Not a bad idea, but I do not sell anything.

I was however quite mad last night and I changed the most commonly linked images to ones in rather bad taste.

Childish I know, but it will certainly cause them to remove it. I still intend to disable hotlinking anyway. If I cannot find a way to implement the method I mentioned above, I will just disable it alltogether.

[katana_one]

Try looking at the current issue of A List Apart. There is an article called "Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention" that sounds like exactly what you are looking for.

[Aleister]

The article at ALA is nice, but it is not quite what I need. Their method still shows the image. It just explains how to give a message on the page saying what site it came from.

I want to disable it completely unless its in a specified directory. It may not be possible. Any ideas anyone? Thanks.

[Aleister]

I just realized something.

Couldn't I just disable hotlinking all-together with my root .htaccess

Then I could put a special .htaccess in the directory I want to allow hot-linking to, which would over-ride the base setting!