Thursday, August 7, 2014

Hot-Linking to Images on Your Web Site

When someone sets up a hot link to an image on your site, the purpose is to use your image on that person's site but your site pays for the bandwidth to serve it.  That sucks in many obvious ways and I've disabled the ability to do it for the Valerie Fraser site.

There's no way to protect images online except to keep your best ones (i.e. highest-resolution) offline.  For example, I'll make a page to display your image.  The user sees it and thinks, hmm, I want that and drags it to the desktop.  OK, to stop that, I can put up an image that fills the whole screen and then I make it invisible.  If anyone tries to click anything on the screen, they will get that instead of the actual image.

Brilliant?

Not exactly.  They will just screen shot the window and get the image anyway.

You cannot prevent it.  No point in wasting time trying.

However, we can prevent people hot-linking to use your site without permission.  They may turn around and steal the image anyway but that's much less likely.


CPanel seems to be close to ubiquitous in the current Web world so look in that for the icon for Hot Link Protection.  Click to Enable / Disable.  Very easy.  You can also use it to specify 'good guy' Web sites which will be permitted to hot link to your images.

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