htaccess redirects for images

Hello,

I'm doing a major overhaul on a big website. The site has 1000's of images, and they are all in the root directory. I have copied and moved them to a directory called /images/, and plan on changing the image paths on as many pages as I can, but the images are used on several of their sister sites and they probably also get a ton of search engine traffic for those images. Is there a way to do something with htaccess to make it so when an image is pulled up in the root directory, that it looks for it in the "/images/" directory instead?

Thanks,

Andy

 

I'm sorry, I should have put this in the Apache Section. I feel really really bad about that. I apologize.

 

Here is what I found, but it is still not working:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# prevent endless loops
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !images/

# capture only the filename 
RewriteRule ^.*/(.*\.jpg|.*\.gif|.*\.bmp) images/$1 [L,R]

Code (markup):

Any ideas?

 

This is the RewriteRule I would use.

RewriteRule ^/?([^/]+)\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/$1.$2 [R=301]

Code (markup):

If there's no further rewrites needed within the /images/ directory, I'd turn off the rewriteengine in that directories htaccess to prevent double rewrite tests.

RewriteEngine off

Code (markup):

 

Does anyone have and .htacsess code to protect images on a win32 server?