Google hotlinking is affecting many webmasters especially those whose earning was depending on images search only. I was getting 3k hits to my fashion website but it was a dream that could hardly live a life of two months and my earning went down after Google had started hotlinking my images on their server. My traffic was dropped down by 30 percent by the changes brought about by Google in image presentation and I didn't know how to get out of it. After I had submitted five petitions against google hotlinking I was very disappointed and decided to figure out a solution myself. I searched a lot online and found two useful plugins for wp blogs ( they could do a real good for your website if you are hosting too many images on your wp blog ), and here is the detail: Imaguard ( when you install or upload it to your blog make sure to add all search engines in the plugin whitelist so that your images can be indexed easily) Here is the link: http://imaguard.com/ Imaguard works very well against hotlinking, it will redirect the visitors to the page where the image is located or originated to. Your images are basically watermarked, which invokes visitors to check the page to see the actual image The second best redirect plugin that you can opt for is REV WP-PICShield - HOTLINK Defence. I have been using this plugin for a while now and it's working very well. My website traffic is getting normal like before with the plugin. It provides image hotlink protect for wp websites by watermarking the images. The links to your images are displayed right on the picture and the visitors are left with not much option than clicking the links to view to the full resolution image. I hope it will help those webmasters who are frustrated and disappointed with the changes in Google images.
There is a plugin for wordpress too. Same as what mentioned on post #1 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/imaguard/
Both Imaguard and Rev WP-Picshield offer hotlinking protection and watermarking. If you don't need watermarking, there's a very simple plugin here: https://github.com/mompracem/direct-images-redirect This plugin does one simple thing - when a visitor tries to hit a direct image link from Google Images ("view original image") or trying to access the bare image url in the browser window, the browser will redirect the visitor to the associated post.