Hotlink Protection

Last week, I started using a new hosting site. This one has the option of HotLink Protection. Is this worth activating? As it looks to me, it prevents anyone not on the allowed list from linking to a photograph on my site and implanting it into a web page on their site. There is an option to allow direct requests, "Allow direct requests (ie. entering the url to an image in your browser)". I can see the benefit, it prevents someone from linking from their website to display one of my pictures on their page and using up my bandwidth. I also know that search engines display pictures on a picture search as a thumbnail. Is this blocked as well? Is it a good idea to block search engines from posting thumbnails with a link to your site? I never thought about that much as I never had the ability to block them before.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Fred,

I have thought about hotlink protection on my site and decided it is not a huge benefit. While I don't like the idea of someone using my images on their site without my approval, I would rather they do that than take a copy of my image and put in on their site anyway. At least with hotlinking, I can include a copyright watermark and even a watermark with my sites URL. If they make a copy, they might also remove that information.

I am with Andrew here. All my images have my name and website URL on them, so if someone hotlinks to them, that is more advertising for me. I havent had any revenue from sale of web-resolution images anyway, so it isnt as if hotlinking is costing me money either.

In fact, I take it a step further - I even have text on my website that allows free, non-commercial, personal use of my low-res images provided they are not cropped or modified in any way. Same benefit.

Vandit

If you activate hotlinks protection, the Web server would disallow any links from outside by absolute URL and return some kind of error code instead of the resource (image) content. IMHO it is not a big deal and could create problems in some cases.

On the second part of the question - if you want to disallow the search engines to index your image files or other parts of your content, you can do that by creating a "robots.txt" file and specifying the disallowed resources in it.

Stefan

Well, I've modified my site so only a few sites I specify can hotlink. I've done this mainly for bandwidth protection because it can really add up if you have a lot of images on you're site being hotlinked. Also, I don't want my site 'linked' through the image if the site that is linking to it is doing some sort of black hat activity - be it bad search engine optimization tactics, or just bad things in general. There are also other reasons, but these are the major ones. All this being said I wouldn't worry about it too much if you've only got a few images on you're site. If you're worried about image searches, you can just include google, yahoo, msn, etc...as sites that can hotlink...

Different people, different answers. Thanks for your responses. I have quite a few pictures posted and that is likely to grow. I have a copyright mark on each photo and have more information on the EXIF files within the photo. My new host actually has tools that even I can figure out where the hits are coning from. I have plenty of bandwidth there. More of what I am concerned with is someone using my pictures ion sites that express opinions, political or otherwise, that I do not agree with. I do have the option of including specific sites.

I will continue to monitor to see what other opinions and suggestions come along and use all in my final decision.

Thanks Folks!!!

For those that don't know, when you access a web page (or an image on a page) the web browser usually sends the details of the referring page (ie how you got to that page, or the URL of the page containing the image). Some people (myself included) configure their browser to not send this information. If you activate hotlink protection you should allow direct access otherwise you'll block images from people whose browsers don't send referrer information.

I didn't know that. I can prevent the receiving web site from telling who I am? Interesting. I will have to remember to allow direct access if I decide to activate this feature.