Are you tired of seeing new incoming links on your dashboard only to find out that it is from an Image Hotlink? You can use it to your advantage. Image bandwidth thieves are a Lazy Lot. They could have uploaded the image to their own posts/articles, but they were too lazy to do that. Most of them are blogspot users, and have dearth of bandwidth. And just because they are lazy, they just copy the image link source code. So how do you use it to your advantage? Usually when we upload a photo on WP, the code is like img src the image url and then the image links back to the same image using a HREF Something like And the hotlinker usually copies the whole lot.. So what I have done is is I changed the href part to link back to the webpage and not the image... SO that the image links back to the webPAGE and not the image placeholder in WP-UPLOAD directory. The net result? 80% of my hotlinkers link back to my site, albeit without an anchor text. But I use the ALT attribute wisely. The picture are relevant to my Post or Page and usually the article that is hotlinking is also revelant to my original article, and I get some link juice.. I am sure many of you know this. For some who haven't, go change the way you upload your pictures..
Interesting idea. Another thing that I do. When I get a hotlinker that gets decent traffic (use your stats to find out how often the image gets uploaded) I replace the picture with a modified one that has a link to my site printed on the bottom of the picture. while this does not give you a link back to your site, it does promote your website. You can often divert a lot of traffic back to your site this way.