How do I protect from hotlinking?

[~kev~]

I want to protect my site and my images from hotlinking. What is the best way to do this?

[Sid Software]

Well you can use a Flash script to open the images. Then people don't know the web address of the images.

[InterShark]

Throw a .htaccess file in your domain root that contains the following....

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?YOURDOMAINNAME.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]

That will stop anyone hotlinking your images.

[~kev~]

Originally Posted by InterShark

Throw a .htaccess file in your domain root that contains the following....

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?YOURDOMAINNAME.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]

That will stop anyone hotlinking your images.

Thank you, but for some reason that did not work. I already have an ,htaccess file in the root, so I added that code at the very bottom.

[InterShark]

Post the code you have ill fix it up for you

[Jenie0109]

Hello, I don't mean to interrupt the discussion but I would like to ask - what is hotlinking?

[zeruel]

Originally Posted by Jenie0109

Hello, I don't mean to interrupt the discussion but I would like to ask - what is hotlinking?

Also called as bandwidth theft, direct linking and inline linking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_theft

[~kev~]

Originally Posted by Jenie0109

Hello, I don't mean to interrupt the discussion but I would like to ask - what is hotlinking?

Its when you have an image on your server, and someone embeds the image in their site. Sites like photobucket, that is the service they offer. You upload the image to photobucket, and then embed the image into different sites.

But in my case, I do not give other people permission to do this. Every time the image is refreshed on that other persons site, my server has to process the image.

It does not sound like its a big deal. But if you have people leaching hundreds of images, it can have a VERY serious impact on your server performance.

Originally Posted by InterShark

Post the code you have ill fix it up for you

Thank you. I will have to wait until this evening to post the .htaccess file, I'am at work right now.