This is the archive for December 2005. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

No hotlinking, please

Tuesday, December 27, 2005 ★ 18:40 ★ Categories Misc, Photography ★ Permanent url

Recently, several of my photos on my blog and photo albums are referred to from external sites (mostly blogs and forums). Those sites generate a lot of unwanted traffic on my web server.

The problem

Of course I like people linking to my site. However, I don’t like people abusing my bandwidth by using my images directly in their own pages. Those requests are not from people visiting my site, but from people leeching one single photo linked to from another site.

One of the popular photos

My solution

If you want to use one of my photos, please ask me before using it! My photos are copyrighted by me! I’m really not that bad: if you like my photos I’m glad to share them with you. That’s why my photo album pages state that full-scale photos are available on request. Yes, that’s right: I’m willing to send you the full-scale 4 megapixel original photographs on request.

The last couple of days, the number of unique IP addresses visiting my site was 3 times higher than I expected it to be. This urged me to take some measures. My solution looks like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} evil-site.tld\/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} another-evil-site.tld\/
RewriteRule (jpg|JPG|jpeg|JPEG)$ /path/to/uwstopia/logo.png

These lines in my .htaccess file make sure the aforementioned evil sites don’t show up with my photos, but with a logo of my site instead. Hopefully this will cause them to stop abusing my bandwidth.

Ranting ends here.