Comments on: How to deter image and bandwidth theft

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:33:48 +0000

Listing in search engines has no bearing on whether images are easy to hotlink or not. It’s always possible to find the path of images. The vast majority of visitors to my site come via Google images searches. Block search engines if you like, but don’t expect to have many visitors afterwards.

By: Tawheed

Tawheed — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:29:15 +0000

Hi David, thanks for you time. I removed the link but its silly how search engines hold us for ransom. After all these years and they still don’t come up with a solution while they can.
Anyways, i guess the better option in this scenario is to watermark the images.
All the best.

By: David Airey

David Airey — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:11:10 +0000

Hello Tawheed, I removed the code from my htaccess file after some people told me my images weren’t showing in their feed readers. As there are a lot of different readers available I thought it’d be more trouble than it was worth keeping the code intact.

By: Tawheed

Tawheed — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:17:41 +0000

Hey David and others. I am sorry to say that I have copied an image url (from your site) from Google Images. I tested it and hotlinking worked. Here is the link http://www.showkatshafi.info on one of my students’ website.
damn Search Engines (Google Images) are still showing full urls of image paths.
I will remove the image as soon as you check it and will also try to find a solution for this, and post it here as well. If anyone else finds a way out, please let us know.

By: Iwan Susanto

Iwan Susanto — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 21:06:54 +0000

Thousand thanks David. My posts (including images on the post) were copied. I have to try this trick.

By: Oliur

Oliur — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:59:07 +0000

Thanks for this David.

Exactly what I was looking for.

Going to copy your image though but obviously add my own text =P

By: Jonah Brown

Jonah Brown — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 09:07:15 +0000

The guy did take down the post.

Jonah

By: Gilang

Gilang — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 02:24:09 +0000

hi, i tried the hotlink code but it was not working as what i thought! all pictures in my website is replaced by nohotlink.jpe that i uploaded in my remote images folder: so images/nohotlink.jpe

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mysite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(bmp|tif|gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [R,L]

could you teach and help how to set the properly hotlink protection.

i have two htaccess fil in root directory @ .htaccess and @.htaccess.bak (if i delete .htaccess.bak, my website error 500)
my hosting is linux at 1and1.com

i got hotlinking from other website server which load my bandwidth such this website: http://cewekasik.com/foto/?q=puting&p=1

By: jonny pigg

jonny pigg — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:03:44 +0000

only just discovered this as a problem when my bandwidth shot up. cheers for posting code, i’ve just gone with the first as i hadn’t read the rest here, will now investigate further. i don’t really mind people nicking images for some things, we’ve all done it at some point i’d bet, just wish they’d do it properly and not steal my bandwidth, that’s just rude.
peace

By: TracyKM

TracyKM — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:34:24 +0000

I really wish I understood 1/2 of what you wrote. I’m just a simple blogger wondering how to find out if any of my pictures have been stolen and are being used elsewhere. Is there a way to do that?