Prtoecting an image

Preventing people from posting an image from your site onto a message board

[Kaspian]

I've seen this done a few times and want to implement it on my own site, hopefully finding some inexpensive or free script to to it, but don't know where to start looking.

Basically these scripts allow your images to show up just fine on your own site, but if someone links directly to your image from a message board or other site another image is displayed in its place which may read along the lines of "The image you are trying to view can be seen at foo.com, please stop devouring our bandwidth". Any idea what a script like this may be called. I'm not entirely sure what I should be looking for. Thanks in advance. :)

[bunltd]

Hi Kaspian -

Here's some good links to info on how to do it with .htaccess files... I've used this to substitute another image.

[webmasterworld.com ]

[webmasterworld.com ]

LisaB

[ninanina]

Hi Kaspian,

I asked a similar question recently, see
[webmasterworld.com...]

there are a lot of useful suggestions

[vincevincevince]

you want to do it by referrer at this basic level

i serve all my images via php and virtual names

are your images actually physically there? or in a database? and do you run php?