How to: Stop Image Hotlinking

Do you ever wonder how to stop those image theft? Protect your blog from someone who just copy and paste images from your site to they blog. This is called “hotlinking”.

If someone hotlinked your images, every time when images are shown on their website, that cost us bandwidth. Because they are loaded from our server. The smart way to prevent  this is via .htaccess file. I found this useful peace of code from guys at hongkiat.com .

Via .htacces we can decide:

• What website to block
• What website to allow
• Allow or deny blank referrers
• Display custom images when hotlinking is detected
• files to protect

If you’re currently not using any .htaccess in your web account you should be creating one. Open up notepad, save it as .

htaccess without any extension behind. For those who already have an existing .

htaccess file, download it to your local computer as we’ll be doing some editing:

Step 1: .htacces hotlink code

Copy and paste this following code inside yout .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain2.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif [NC,R,L]

Explanation

Line 2 – Allow blank referrers (recommended).

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

Some users surf under firewall and thus they are not providing any referrers information. Disallowing blank referrers will means blocking them from accessing these images. However if you want to

block blank referrers, just delete line 2.

Line 3, Line 4 –

Sites allowed to link your images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain2.com [NC]

By default all

sites are blocked from hotlinking. Only those specified by you are allowed to do so.

Line 5 – File format to block, custom blocking images.

RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif [NC,R,L]

In between the () are images you intended to block from hotlinking. To add more seperate them with”|”

Change ‘http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif‘ to a image you’ve set, and whenever

image hotlinking is detected, this image will show up. Just make sure where this image is not hotlink protected or your server can go into an endless loop.

No Hotlinking! Wordpress plugin

For those who have no experience with coding there is wordpress plugin that do job for you.

Lim Dul of Bahn-spass wrote a plugin for Wordpress that helps prevent

image hotlinking as easy as installing and activating. It blocks

image hotlinking by displaying this following

image by default.

Just upload to your wp-content/plugins and activate plugin via admin panel. Go to setup and set your custom image to show up whenever hotlinking is detected:

Download Wordpress Plugin Here