Comments on: What to do About Hotlinked Images?

By: Doris

Doris — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:28:47 +0000

Just write to them and ask that they kindly remove them… how do you track, Char?

By: Study Guide

Study Guide — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:10:18 +0000

Char, IMO there’s basically three different approaches to this problem:
a) Just send them a friendly e-mail and tell them about your feelings. Most people respond to this.
b) Change the htaccess file so to stop people from hotlinking.
c) The most evil technique. Don’t stop them from hotlinking just change the picture to something that will make them feel ashamed, such a picture with the text “This person is a thief, stole it from my site)

There is a really awkward incident where Senator J.Mcain Myspace page (his crew hotlinked every image on their theme from this webdesigner without even giving him the credit!) so he got back on them by changing one of the pictures to read something like “I know support gay marriage”, you can sure bet they stopped hotlinking that image.

By: Gayla McCord

Gayla McCord — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:11:59 +0000

I usually take the sympathetic road at first too. Most times people haven’t a clue of what they’ve done and will do what they can to resolve the issue quickly. If not, I take more extreme measures by commenting on their blog announcing the theft and threaten to report them to their affiliates as a scamming/scrapper site. That usually does the trick.

By: Traveller

Traveller — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:16:26 +0000

BTW, you have a wonderful blog, full of useful info. I expect to be back periodically.

By: Traveller

Traveller — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:09:05 +0000

I guess it is not a big deal if the traffic is small, but yes you could indeed point them to this info. It took me a while to figure this one out when I began blogging.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:34:29 +0000

You can use htaccess file to stop people hotlinking, only allow you’re website to use the images in a certain directory.
I’ve only had one person hotlinking me but I let it go as it was only being used as a background image, and its on facebook so isn’t hogging much bandwidth.

By: wendii

wendii — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:46:43 +0000

Hello Char,

I’m a new blogger and really have no clue what I’m doing. I would take a gentle email telling me what I’ve done wrong and what I should have done as help and be very grateful for it!

Wendii

By: Jean Browman

Jean Browman — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:45:00 +0000

I’m still new at this. I’m writing a post and referring to a picture of Sigmund Freud holding a cigar. I found it at Encyclopedia Britannica and it clearly isn’t in the public domain, so I can’t right click it and save. I assume linking to the whole Britannica page is perfectly legitimate?

By: Tony D. Clark

Tony D. Clark — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:45:05 +0000

@David – You should be able to check your server logs to see how your images are being called (a lot by one IP for example). You can also do a Google search for the image name and see if it’s showing up under any other sites.

By: Char

Char — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:35:41 +0000

David – the only way I know is to really look over your web stats and the resource usage.

Does anyone else have a quick way of figuring it out?