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April 10, 2004

Protecting pictures and other files with .htaccess

Recently people have been stealing my bandwidth by “hotlinking” ass of the week images from my site. Hotlinking means they include the pictures in their own web site, but they are actually being downloaded from my servers. So they get the pictures on their site, but are using my bandwidth.

I don’t appreciate this very much.

So, I have used .htaccess to prevent that from happening. Now if you link to my images from another web site, you are given a “broken image” instead of the picture actually showing up.

Here is the code to do it in case you have a similar problem:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .*.(gif|jpg)$ - [N,F,L]

IndexIgnore *

Just replace “yoursite.com” with your domain name and any other site you want to be able to display your images.

Copy/paste this info into a file in the directory you want to protect, and call it .htaccess (note the period before the name). You maybe have to turn on “View all hidden files” in your FTP client in order to see the file, because it is normally hidden.

The last line, “IndexIgnore *” will keep people from being able to display a directory listing, and seeing all of the images in a directory. Instead of seeing all of the AotW pictures in the whole directory, you’ll just see this.

Thanks to ScriptyGoddess for the info!

Posted by derek at April 10, 2004 02:15 PM | TrackBack

Comments

does this mean you’ll bring back the ass of the week archive??

Posted by: derek rose at April 12, 2004 11:04 PM

No, the archive is gone.

Posted by: Derek Rose at April 13, 2004 09:27 AM

OR, you can just go into CPanel or if you have a website your sites control panel and enable hotlinking, which mean it sets everything up for you, all you have to do is type a few things, you dont have to create anything, it does it all for you….

Posted by: Ed at May 30, 2004 01:04 AM