bandwidth theft

is there a way to track who is stealing images?

[bessington]

Looking through my referrers I noticed that a lot of the sites were actually using images from my site - direct link and all, no re-name. Is there a way to search for sites that are linking to images from your site? I have seen some solutions for stopping this.. mainly .htaccess programming. any additonal recommendations? Thank you!

[Span]

There's a member of these forums who has great fun to rename his hotlinked images and replace them with custom made 'little commercials'.

Some members have seen a 20% raise in amount of visitors by only putting the URL of their site on their images.

It's still hotlinking and bandwidth theft though.

[KimmoA]

Those 20% couldn't be from something else? ;)

[natural number]

Nah, its against the spirit of the web to stop someone from "stealing images", I think. You should just put your domain on the images themselves, then you'll get free advertising. But, I guess if it is costing you lots of money, then go get them... but I'm guessing you want different opinions so I give mine.

[DXL]

I don't consider it "against the spirit of the web" to prevent people from hotlinking. That's suggesting that crashing someone's site from massive hotlinking is actually "in" the spirit of what the web is there for.

The first two years, I fought against hotlinking by renaming files, loading dummy files, moving images to another directory once in a while. It was a bigger issue when host X used to only offer 1.5 gigs of bandwidth a month, and every gig you went over the limit cost you $7 that month.

But with 40-80 gigs of bandwidth being the standard in most inexpensive accounts, I've welcomed hotlinking. I just learned to slap my URL on every single picture I upload to the site. I still stay within my bandwidth allowance each month, but I'm getting a huge amount of free exposure, not to mention being able to track what other sites my visitors tend to frequent. Its only a problem when someone's hotlinking 10 or more images, then I'll contact said person and kindly ask them to take a few down, or just rename the files.

[bessington]

thanks for the replies.. i will consider advertising my site on the image. :)

-bess

[physics]

Also you can stop this in .htaccess like you mentioned (search here for threads on that). You can also serve a different image (read ad) instead using the .htaccess techniques.