Hotlinking

How do you deal with this?

[Tonearm]

How do you deal with people hotlinking your images and thereby using up your bandwidth and CPU? I've read about the mod_rewrite solution, but that relies on HTTP_REFERER which is not always passed. I could watermark all my images with my domain name, but that takes away from the experience on my own site.

Just wondering if there is a solution I didn't think of, other than just forgetting about it.

[Quadrille]

One solution is to move the image to another folder and rename it (updating your pages, of course!), and substitute another image using the old location and name.

For example, ebay is full amusing, rude and downright unpleasant images stating 'this image was stolen from'.

Often, just moving the image is enough, however. And many web hosts will set up a blocking solution for all your domains at no cost and little effort (it's in their interest too, in many cases).

[Tonearm]

Moving them would work for the images that are currently hotlinked, but I'd like to set something up that would prevent this from happening in the future too. Not sure if there is such a solution.

Setting up any kind of blocking would rely on the unreliable HTTP_REFERER I think.

[dpd1]

I think modifying .htaccess is really your best bet. It may not be 100%, but it sure beats nothing. I went from about 100 megs a day in hot-linking, to zero once I did it. I knew the problem had gotten out of control when the first of the month came and I already had about 1000 hotlink impressions by lunch time. The biggest problem is outright content theft, which is much harder to deal with. Unfortunately I just had to deal with my first major one, which thankfully worked itself out. But I guess that's the drawback of constantly improving a site... People just steal from you more.

[adb64]

I use a referrer based detection and if it is not from my own site I will serve an image stating that the image was taken from my site without authorization.
If there are only a few hits from one site I leave it with that, but when a lot of hits occur I send the site owner an email with the kind request to remove the hotlink. Most of the times that is enough. If not, I send another email one or two weeks later and the image is replaced by a not so nice picture. When the hotlink is then still not removed my server will automatically replace it after a week with an adult #*$! picture. In the email I warn the owner of the site that that will happen. That always solves the problem.

[Tonearm]

I guess what I'll do is set up mod_rewrite to serve a different version of the image if the referrer specifies another domain name. The alternate version of the image will have my domain name written on it. That way, anyone on my site won't see the domain name in the image, and most people seeing the hotlinked image will see the domain name. At least I'll be benefiting from the expended resources.

I wonder about interfering with image searches, but I could add all the image search domain names I know of to the mod_rewrite script.

[ken_b]

I labeled my images with my domain name and turned them all into ads for my site. That's not the answer for everyone, but it works for me.

Part of the reason is the type of site I have. My target audience pretty freely shares images and not allowing hot linking could well have a negative effect for me.

I don't track how many images are hot linked, but it's prrobably a fairly high number compared to the number of images on my site.

[Tonearm]

ken_b, do you serve a "domain name image" based on the referrer or all the time, even on your own site?

[ken_b]

... all the time ...

All the time, which is fairly common in my niche. No referer basing.

Most of the time my images end up in forums when they get hot-linked.

[Wlauzon]

..I labeled my images with my domain name and turned them all into ads for my site...

That is what I have started doing also. There are so many sources of hotlinking and outright stolen pictures that now every original picture we have has our URL on it.