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Old 02-10-2007, 03:58 PM
Connie
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Post How to protect your photos from hotlinking - A Primer

This post is meant as a tutorial and it will come in "chapters".
So there is no public reply function. You are free to discuss this in other postings, but treat this as a tutorial...

And also: I collected these informations and they work for me with different accounts, but I cannot guarantee that everything will work for everybody!

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A photoblog is aimed to show your photos.
You want to present your photos in the context which you create / design / layout.
You do not want to find your photos at other websites, in some blogs or community-portals ..

Well, I noticed some phenomen in the last time regarding my photos at photografitti.net and the server-load there increased:

increasing hits at photografitti.net, but not so many hits to index.php

what was going on?
I did a websearch and found out, that many of my images were "hotlinked" from other sites.
I checked these sites and found that some of my photos sat in very disgusting, obscene or stupid teeny-postings and other blablabla-pages

these people just entered the URL of my photos when they added images to their blog-posts

but how did they find my photos? I never saw these people in my stats..

the answer was: they found my images at images.google.com and just copied the URL there, they never visited my site..

What to do?

There are different steps to prevent hotlinking.
I will describe them in the following posts. Step by Step.
  1. how to stop hotlinking
  2. how to stop images.google.com to index your photos and to present them in images.google.com
  3. how to decrease the searchability of your photos (not for your website!)

Last edited by Connie; 02-15-2007 at 07:13 PM.