Bandwidth Theft

I don't use htaccess to prevent others from hot linking my images on my blog because I get a healthy amount of traffic from google images.

Problem is I came across a few sites today that are hot linking directly to the images.

How can I stop them?

 

I believe there is a way to do this in your control panel.

 

Add this code in your htaccess file to prevent hotlinking of images
when someone hotlinks theyll just see a red x instead of the image

This is the best method,than working in your Cpanel Hotlink protection

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourwebsite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourwebsite/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|jpeg|JPEG)$

 

Doesn't this block hot linking all together. If you did this, wouldn't you lose google image referral traffic...that's something I want to avoid.

 

Yes you're right, this will block all images from anywhere that's not your own site.

Why not try this?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://badguywebsite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://badguy2website.net/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|jpeg|JPEG)$

Edit and put as many
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://badguywebsite.com/.*$ [NC] lines as you need.

 

Surely it's better to ban individual domain names. i'm pretty cool with hotlinking but occasionally sites really abuse it. I had three South Korean news websites all link to a story at once, they didn't host the pictures themselves but rather took our text, published it verbatim on their website and then furnished the article with our pictures hotlinked from our server. I banned each one individually on noticing 120,000 uniques had hit those files.

Remember, lots of forums that hotlink your images will send you lots of traffic too... be discriminating.

 

How about sending a warning or two.
You can direct the images to come out as another image