Image Requests

normally direct or referred?

[DavidT]

I disallow direct requests on images in htaccess, but get a lot of visitors who receive nothing but 403 errors for images. Either they are trying to download the page/images or their browsers are the problem.

So, are most browsers programmed to treat the page as the refferrer for an image file that is called by a relative link in the page code, or do some make direct requests? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

[Jocelyn]

In some browsers (Opera...) you can disable referrers. Those users would be completely unable to see your images.
Why don't you just forbid viewing of your images for external referrers (referrers not coming from your own site/server)?
To track when problems occur, you could record HTTP_USER_AGENT when the user gets a 403.

Jocelyn

[universalis]

Also if, like me, you use the Norton Internet Security firewall/antivirus package, the referrers are disabled by default. I believe that you will find this the case with many other firewall products too.

[DavidT]

Hi Jocelyn ( and hi universalis)

I don't want people who use download tools like FlashGet or HTTrack to just be able to rip the site in a few minutes. Too much time and effort and a little bit of money went into developing the images and in my industry thieving of other sites product pics is commonplace. However if a lot of honest people are just seeing broken image links then I'll have to rethink it.

This is one example from today:
67.80.135.145 - - [25/Mar/2003:08:50:30 -0800] "GET /Assets/images/picture.jpg HTTP/1.1" 403 243 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; {Cablevision Systems Corporation})"

This visitor got nothing but 403s for images. All requests, including html and css files were direct, no referrer. I'm wondering if his browser is making the 'wrong' kind of request (or as you say he has disabled referrers) or is he actually trying to whack the site?

[g1smd]

>> {Cablevision Systems Corporation} <<

Hmm, user is on a WebTV system, perhaps?

If you are worried about people ripping your images, then watermark them.