How to keep people from stealing your forum images

[Beverly]

On one of my sites, I was constantly seeing a bandwidth spike on a particular image. It turns out someone had posted one of my photos on another forum and it was getting massive daily views. I changed the name of the image on my site and that cured the problem, causing any sites stealing the image to show a broken image.

Then, I started hosting all site images on photo sharing sites like tinypic so that if someone decided to hotlink to one of my images, it would not really cause a bandwidth spike.

What are some ideas you use to prevent people from hotlinking your forum or blog photos?

 

[Shortie]

This is a difficult one to be honest. Changing the file name works however after a while people would start hotlinking to the new image name meaning you would have to change it again. I guess using a free service like tinypic is one way to prevent any problems for you and your hosting. I am sure there is a way to be able to change the image or have a message displayed on the image if someone hotlinks however I would not know where to start on that.

 

[Maximum]

Honestly its 99% impossible to stop other people from stealing your images.

 

[proxynvpn]

It's pretty impossible to stop people from stealing your images. One way would be to change the file on say a monthly basis so that if anyone did hotlink the file name change would make it a broken image.

 

[Deka]

Here are some suggestions:

• Disable hotlinking. There are plugins like Hotlink Protection or ByRev WPPICShield which allow you to stop external servers from linking to your files or even replace the hotlink with a message or warning. Or you can just simply edit the .htaccess file in your coding.

• Watermarking your images. This is a good way for your site to gain popularity even from the image thieves' sites. You simply put your site's name as a watermark on the images. The larger it is, the better so the thief cannot crop it out. Most likely, thieves won't even bother cropping your watermark out.

Good luck!