How To Stop Your Images from Being Accessed on other sites?

I have run into a problem where people take my images off my site, then reuse them in other forums, but I am still hosting the images, so each time a person accesses the page with my image on it it shows up in my logs as a unique visit.

It's no big deal, but at least one person from MySpace has taken an images(s) from my, posted it on there space on MySpace, and now I am getting huge bandwidth usage. Like 4000+ a day!

I joined MySpace, and I have looked in a lot of places and done searches, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

I know how to stop people from stealing my images going forward, but any creative ideas as to how I stop this bandwidth usage?

Thanks

 

Ah, the joys of MySpace... Now there's a stat I see time and time again. Them and the demon Piczo.

Smyrl has already mentioned it. In cPanel there's an option to add hot link protection, but whats really fun is if you use the option to display a warning graphic. My favourite is a 1000x1000 transparent gif with a tiny bit of writing in with your url. It does wonders to site layouts where they haven't got the size defined...

That or change the hot link image to Donkey porn for endless hours of childish amusement.

 

First, thanks for the replies. Unfortunately, I have thousands of images and I don't know which ones are the culprits. So I can't replace them. Also, I am on Microsoft server (not my choice) - so maybe I will call my hosting comapany and ask?

Any ideas as to how to find out exactly which image it is?

 

Just ask a hacker to go in and change it.

If you can locate the image that's getting hits in the log, the 1000x1000gif works just as well, and donkey porn is still appropriate.

 

you can use hotlink protection if your host provides you with a cPanel

 

There is no cPanel unfortunately, my host company told me there is no htaccess quivalent in Windows so they can't do anything. Is that possible???

 

http://www.isapirewrite.com/

It's mod-rewrite for IIS and with that tool you can prevent the hotlinking and they have examples of it in the documentation... very easy to install and configure. For a single domain it's free to use.

 

Nitin,

Thanks - I appreciate it.

 

you can use .htaccess to redirect it to a php script which will print your website name in the images for some popularity, if you do not want that then you can just redirect it to a picture which says 'NO HOT Links Allowed'..

 

I believe this is the cpanel message you should get to protect yourself ...

"Hotlink protection is currently enabled

HotLink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified below) on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don't specify below (ie. html files). An example of hotlinking would be using a <img> tag to display an image from your site from somewhere else on the net. The end result is that the other site is stealing your bandwidth. You should ensure that all sites that you wish to allow direct links from are in the list below. This system attempts add all sites it knows you own to the list, however you may need to add others. "

Mine was by default "enabled"

 

If I was you I would just dump the host and go with a Linux solution with cPanel.

 

Anyone know if these image/links count as a backlink for Google? One of them actually showed up when I used http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/

 

Hi,

I think they do contribute as backlinks, but only Google know for sure. They used to display them as backlinks until a year or so ago.

Also an alternative to fighting hot-linking, is to encourage people to use your images. If you can draw your website address in the corner of the photo, it's pretty good advertising, but of course you may have to consider how much you will pay for the extra bandwidth.

Cheers,
Paz.

 

You can Disabling The Right-click Mouse Button

NOTE: Before testing the script, remove the dot preceding the tag. It has been put there to prevent the script from executing.

.<script language=JavaScript>
var IE;
var NN;

if(navigator.appName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
IE=true;
}

if(navigator.appName=="Netscape")
{
NN=true;
}





The above code checks what browser the user is using and store the information accordingly. Both the browsers use different class variable names to store different events.





.<script language=JavaScript>
var IE;
var NN;

if(navigator.appName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
IE=true;
}

if(navigator.appName=="Netscape")
{
NN=true;
}





And the code below captures the event and sends it to the browser.



.<script language=JavaScript>
var IE;
var NN;

if(navigator.appName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
IE=true;
}

if(navigator.appName=="Netscape")
{
NN=true;
}

 

Funny, I just wrote a tutorial on this today ::

Well, since I am a newbie, it would not let me post the code for some reason, you can PM me if you want the code ::

How to stop leechers from stealing your ebooks, images, software, and original content.


If you are selling digital products (ebooks, software) or you have nice images or original content on your site that you don't want people to reference from other sites (stealing your bandwidth) then you need to protect these assets.

There are several tricks you can do on your server with .htaccess to stop this. Editing .htaccess is easy … it is as simple as uploading a small text file. If you want help with .htaccess, ask your system administrator, or submit a help ticket

To stop leechers of certain file types, add this to your .htaccess file ::

This will stop people from linking to any gif, jpg, pdf, or zip file from any domain that is not yours. That way they can't serve / pull your images or other files from their site.

You can even stop people from linking to certain pages on your site.

For example, if your pages use the ".html" extension, rename the pages you don't want linked to with the ".htm" extension, then in your .htacccess file, add the .htm extension to the forbidden list, along with gif, jpg, pdf, and zip -- like this ::

This way, no one can link to your download page unless they link to it from your server! … Or, no one can see your original articles unless they come to your site first!

 

Thanks for the info - at the beginning of the post I think I wrote that I know all too well how to stop people from stealing my images - my prblem is witb previously already stolen images - and htaccess ios out - I am on Windows - but I think I have it figuerd out, so thanks