Deep linking images off my web site

[moz]

I just went through the referrer logs on my main photo site and discovered that ~30,000 hits a month were coming from people using my images in all sorts of places. 80% were myspace users. So I've blocked the top ten referrers to save bandwidth and hassle, replacing it with the sort of image you're all familiar with:



Which is 2kB rather than the ~50kB that I average. Special users (myspace) get a 10kB gif... that's the smallest file I could find that holds a 4000x3000 pixel image (because most myspace users don't use size tags on their linked images

Is this common? Does anyone else do anything about it?

[Nnnnsic]

I've not looked before.

I might do this to see if anyone's using my pics.

[rmp]

Yes, it's extremely common. It's call hotlinking. Deeplinking is linking to a web page on the site that isn't the home page.

You've taken a restrained approach to the problem. Most people would simply replace the image with some pornography, although there's problems with that as well, not least a probable contravention of your ISPs standards. Your approach of the massive file is good too.

There's more here:

http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html

and Google will help out if you search for "hotlinking".

[thaddeus]

I get zillions of them on my aerial shots of Sydney. I gave up blocking them because they came from so many different sources. I wrote a script to rotate the filenames but in the end moved to a higher bandwidth server so I don't care any more. All the high-res files are watermarked so I get quite a bit of traffic from people seeing the watermark and coming to my site anyway.

[moz]

It's easy to block *everyone*, the complication (for me) is that there's a lot of people that I am happy to have using my images. So I end up with an Apache mod_rewrite script that's 40 lines long and only has about 20 blocked refererrers. The easy way if your host uses Apache is just a .htaccess file with

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/luvmoz.jpg$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?moz.net.nz/.*$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ /luvmoz.jpg [R,L]

Almost any host will have rewrite available, and it costs nothing to try The above means that anyone hotlinking gets the luvmoz.jpg instead of the picture they want.

Since I have friends on just about all the common free hosts, I've had to do a deny list one item at a time, with myspace in particular being an "all myspace except these three" type entry. It's all a bit painful really. But it means that my useful stuff can be used, and I'm not helping gun nuts and neo-nazi's (unless you count a big blank gif as "helpful").