about protected folders

how to use them

[Reid]

I have a photo gallery (600 or so images), the way it is right now I have html pages of thumbnails which call the pic's out of folders full of jpgs and thumbnails. When you click on a thumbnail it calls a .jpg straight up.
This is wide open and unprotected. it's time to upgrade my gallery. I'm also considering making an HTML page to go with each .jpg with a description and stuff rather than just serving up straight .jpg's

I am getting crawled by google images and from what I hear, the next thing is people will start using my images and my bandwidth will go thru the roof etc.

I have the option of password protecting these folders but then how do I call them from my gallery page? I just want to understand this a bit before i start messing with it. I never played with protected folders yet. how do I make them available to my page but not to bandwidth thieves?
I'm not interested in photo gallery software, I,m in HTML 4.01 transitional WYSIWYG mode. I use tables for layout and CSS for style.

[dreamcatcher]

If you use .htaccess, that should do the trick:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif¦jpg¦jpeg¦bmp)$ - [F,NC]

or something like that I think.

dc

[cooldoug]

I use jalbum for making image galleries, It is very easy with that software. Instead of doing all that stuff, just go with the software, its much easier.:)

[Reid]

already set up the htaccess file - works great thanks