Stop people linking to images on your website.

mattyh

mattyh

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7,021
Name
Matt
Edit My Images
Yes
If you want to stop people Hotlinking to images on your website, you can do so by changing persmissions in the .htacess file stored on the root of your server.

Follow this useful guide for how to do it:

Clicky

Don't do it if you're not confident editing website stuff, or you'll break it :)
 
But won't this stop you linking your images to sites like this one using the img tags?

If you ask me, the only way to protect images on a website is to have them at a small enough resolution to make them unuseable (though saying that the latest interpolation software can find a hell of alot of information even in an 800x600 image) and to have a visible watermark on the image itself.
 
Thought so Matt. As you say, you can't have it all. :)

After finding some of my images on various websites, either stolen or linked without credit, I now have 2 visible logos on all images. For low value images, bottom left, for high value images right across the middle. It does work and now I find more sites asking for permission to link, which is even better.

If you want to approach this totally seriously then the htaccess route, combined with a digital watermark and visible watermark is the only route. :)
 
Now that is just plain annoying! I can still see it now and it has been 6 seconds six I close that browser tab! :bonk:
 
>>But won't this stop you linking your images to sites like this one using the img tags?

You can put exception code to allow you to link from your own site. This is shown on the flashing image link page.

Code: 
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://internetmarketingfool.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.internetmarketingfool.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ [url]http://www.internetmarketingfool.com/images/hotlinked.gif[/url] [R,NC]

For your local site, lines 3&4 need changing - and you can obviously add other sites to the exceptions for other domains you own, for example.

And of course the url in the last line needs changing to your own "Go away your bandwidth leeches of uncertain parentage" image.

All good fun!

B.
 
Though it will only work if your web host is using apache and if they allow you to use mod_rewrite. I know of quite a few who don't allow mod_rewrite which is always a pain.
 
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