Hot-linked images that don't exist any more?

[fatfree69]

Hi,

I have people hot-linking photos from my website, but I do not mind it at all.

The photos on my website are sometimes removed. Is there anything I can do to have a broken hot-linked photo to display another default photo automatically?

I want a default photo to show a logo of my website and say "Photo not available" or something, if the hot-linked photo is broken.


thanks

[htmlbasictutor]

Originally Posted by fatfree69

I have people hot-linking photos from my website, but I do not mind it at all.

You do realize they are stealing bandwidth from you, don't you. i.e. costing you money.

Originally Posted by fatfree69

The photos on my website are sometimes removed. Is there anything I can do to have a broken hot-linked photo to display another default photo automatically?

Make your replacement picture as template in Photoshop (or something like that) then save the image with the name of the image that was hotlinked.

Hey! While I was Googling to find the script to replace missing images found this: Can Hotlinking Damage Your Google Image Search Rankings? ("...the answer is yes...") There's a couple of tutorials in that article on how to handle hotlinking.

[fatfree69]

- No, it's not costing me money. I get up to 1TB monthly transfer, and each month I only achieved roughly 40GB transfers (less than 1% of my monthly limit)

- I thought of just replacing a photo with the deleted one, but I have roughly 5060 photos, and they get deleted and replaced quite often (by other users). So I don't want to have multiple "default" images with different file names. And I have hundreds that are hotlinked.

- Google Image search has no effect on my site as the photos are brought up by php searches instead of on a static page, so they aren't ever found on Google Images anyways.


Just to give you an idea of how my site works: My site

[Hades]

If you are using apache and have the mod_rewrite module, it is possible to set up a .htaccess file and put a rewrite condition to replace images for a default one if the requested image is not found,

Check the mod_rewrite usage with RewriteCond and the -f modifier, the code should look, more or less like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule $ /path to your default image [L]

[fatfree69]

thanks! I will see if I can work with it.