Rewrite them to a txt file with your sites url in it if they have a referrer different from your domain?
I haven't paid for the project yet. But here is something how it'd work: http://av595.comex.ru/projects/demo/lorien1973/test.html See how the image looks? Here is what happens if you hotlink the same image: Is this a goal to work towards? I'm sure the text position/color etc could be improved.
I take the pictures myself for about half of the urns on our urn site and then scumbags copy our images from our site to sell on their site (from same manufacturer) and they even keep our green background. Now we have been editing things to show that can't be easily edited out. Ha - jerks! I called the guy and he acted like he had no idea that they were from our site, like he had a webmaster who didn't know. duh...
LOL, I did that to a guy a while ago... See this thread, check out Lobopack's avatar: http://t i m e s f o u r. c o m /eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/938109321/m/169108833 I didn't think of putting my URL on it, though...
Testing the script to see if it works: Sweet; that is it put in the fly for hotlinked images. If anyone wants something similar, I'll email you the programmer's name who did this.
FUNNY!!!!! One minor nit is this image could easily be a 1/4 the size and you probably wouldn't see a visual difference if you saved with some moderate compression in Photoshop.
great ideal the best would be if there was a way to watermark the images like the above example as they are being served to the other domains and keep the orginal on your site.
This is definitely possible as I'm doing it on my site right now. If someone attempts to hotlink an image I just have it add a watermark on the fly so my site logo is displayed in the bottom corner of the picture with the URL. I also make the image quality a bit worse to conserve bandwidth. Works great I could see it possibly becoming an issue if I get 1000's of people hotlinking my images on busy forums but so far it isn't an issue since the site is fairly new (~3 months old).
I mainly had a problem with myspace and blog.lide.cz I show a 3KB file instead of the hotlinked image, I have around 8000 requests for that each day. Just a few extra KB image size over a month translates into quite a few MB
never worked with flash before but if you could show a small flash splash screen with a live link that would be cool! more clicks
I was not sure if it would work or not as I do not play around with flash. But if so thats an idea to thank about not need to open a new browser and type in the url just "Click Here To View Original Picture!". I would bet that your traffic from these would more then double
I've had some issues with the lide folks too - I just did the same thing and placed a "text ad" on the pics they were hotlinking. I have plenty of bandwidth, so I don't mind so much when I can track these people (their sites) down and then merely alter the pic for free advertising.
I usually find these theives from looking through my stats. One example would be 3 1400 2.99% http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm One one of my newer and hence lesser known subdomains, this is my #3 referrer so far for the month on this site showing 1400 hits or about 3% of all hits. So now I will run a backlink checker on this site and then follow the myspace links to see exactly what pics are being hotlinked ... then go alter the pics for either advertising for me, embarassment to the theif, or maybe a bit of both