Can you add a watermark to hotlinked images on the fly?

serving the requested image with your URL appended to it?

[Fribble]

Hi all,

I'm one of the many webmasters here who is noticing a huge upward trend of myspacers and bloggers that are hotlinking images. I used to just ignore it since bandwidth is cheap these days but since the myspace explosion the amount of hotlinking has gone through the roof.

I want to use something that would automatically append my url to the bottom of any hotlinked images and then serve them as requested.

Anyone done this? Is the best way to do this simply to create a second set of images with the watermark and use .htaccess to serve them up (= lot's of labor) or is there a known scripting solution that won't bog my server down?

Thanks,

Fribs

[le_gber]

how about creating a single image with your logo and url and encouraging people to visit your site :)

Yes I believe it's done through .htaccess

[chrisranjana]

Here is a link to an article which deals with watermarking images using PHP and GD

[sitepoint.com...]

[Fribble]

Le_gber, I don't mind people hotlinking my images so long as my sites are still fast and I have the bandwidth to spare - especially if I can get some advertising out of the deal. Completely replacing the hotlinked images would cause people to simply drop the hotlink and I'd loose out any possible branding and visitors. A non-intrusive watermark can retain the image's appeal to the hotlinkers AND bring people to my sites.

chrisranjana - thanks for the link, looks like I'll be spending the weekend learning and playing with GD. It will be interesting to watch my traffic once I make this change to see how much of an impact it has.

Thanks again!