I have seen on some sites, that if you try and hotlink, the image simply appears as 'this image is from xxxxx site' instead. How are they doing that, or is there an easier way to prevent it? (btw I dont want to have to keep changing the images names every week to prevent it). Thanks guys.
Go to your control panel and see if there is not an automatic function to block hotlinking? If not you can manually set up your .htaccess file to block. If on an iis server do not know how. The image below shows what I find in my control panel. I am not an expert on .htaccess files. If the person hotlinking is coming from a fixed ip add the following to your .htaccess file deny from 123.44.678.90 or whatever the ip is. If they are hitting from a range of ip's look at a .htaccess tutorial for how to deny a range.
Thank you. Could you give me an example as I tried that in the past and it didn't work, but maybe I got the format wrong.
Here is the code I am using which is generated by the automatic function provided in control panel RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.cin$ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]