image hotlinking

July 28th, 2005, 11:12 pm

I have a site with several images that tend to get hotlinked... I have no problem with that, but I'd like the name of my site (or the logo if that's possible) to be printed over my images whenever someone links to them from an external site. If the images are seen from my own site I wouldn't want the site name to show.

Is this possible?

July 28th, 2005, 11:28 pm

not without processing the image on the fly (which is server intensive) and a foolproof way to determine the referer (impossible, currently).

The other way is to make your users login before they can view images. If the user isn't logged in, display the image with your logo. If they are, display the regular image.

I tried early on to implement a no-login anti-hotlinking script on my site based on IP and referer. It backfired in my face.

If you try to use IP and/or referer to prevent hotlinking, you will get MANY complaints.