A picture paints a thousand words so the saying goes and there must be truth in it otherwise the likes of Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook wouldn’t be half as successful as they are.
More and more people are in the habit of using images to depict how they are feeling. These images range from selfies to animated gifs from TV shows or celebs making strange faces or doing foolish things.
It’s fine when people are sharing and posting images to their own spaces but it’s a whole other can of worms when they directly link to someone else’s content. This is called hotlinking and it is very bad.
I noticed that I was getting a bit more traffic to some posts on my site. When I checked my analytics the bounce rate was high and the time on site ranged from no time at all to under 30 seconds. On further checking, I found that the images in those posts had been hot linked. This means people were viewing the image from another site without having to visit my site. There are actually websites out there with galleries of images hotlinked from other sites. Quite frankly this is sucky behaviour.
Not only does it skew your analytics it also steals your bandwidth. Every time someone views the image on the other site, it’s your server that is serving up that image. Yes, that’s right your bandwidth is being stolen, you are paying for it and your pearls of wisdom remain unread.
This practice has been around for a long time and seems to be growing in popularity but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with it.
Is someone hotlinking to my images?
To check if your images are being linked to go to Google images and perform this search:
inurl:yourname.com -site:yourname.com
(make sure to put your domain name instead of yourname.com).
This tells the search to look for links with your site name in the URL but not to include internal links from your site. If the search returns any results this means those images are being directly linked to from your site.
How do I stop image hotlinking?
If like me you don’t’ fancy having a conversation with the people that are hotlinking to your site, you can rename all your images or you can add something to your .htaccess file that will prevent the bad behaviour.
Your .htaccess file can be found in the root folder of your server. Before you make any changes back it up just in case.
First, create an image that will show up every time someone tries to hotlink to an image on your site. You can just go with ‘stealing bandwidth is bad’ or you can get creative. Upload this to your image folder.
Now edit the text below replacing your-site.com with your domain details and the name of the image to the one you created and then copy it to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?your-site.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?Pinterest.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://www.yourname.com/wp-content/uploads/stealingisbad.gif [NC,R,L]
For every site you don’t want to ban – like Pinterest – add another line.
This will not prevent your posts being shared to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, it’s just for those lazy or unaware people who can’t be bothered to download an image and upload it to their own space.
To check that your images can no longer be linked to use the hotlink checker. Remember to clear your browser cache first or use a different browser.
If you are worried about editing your .htaccess file or are on a WordPress hosted server you can try the Hotlink Protection WordPress plugin. If you’d like to stop Google and other search engines from serving up your images willy nilly, you can use Imaguard which will blur and add a watermark to your images. Direct hits on your images will be redirected to a post page showing the image in your usual page layout.
If you are one of those people who link to an image rather than download it, please stop. If you don’t want to ask the site owner for permission to use their images, at least have the decency to upload them to your own space and maybe give credit where it’s due.
I’ve seen people do this on Twitter, instead of uploading the image to Twitter they post a link to someone’s photo. I don’t think people who do this are aware that it’s wrong.
As for the sites that build galleries from other people’s images, I hope everyone breaks the links and reduce these horrid sites to nothing.
I have taken a small amount of pleasure in revisiting the sites that have linked to my images to see broken image links. Only a small amount of pleasure though as this shouldn’t been happening.
I agree that a lot of people are unaware that what they are doing is wrong but those who build complete galleries must have an inkling.
I think the gallery builders know what they are doing. It looks like they have deliberately targeted image directories including the WordPress uploads folder. They probably used a script which equates to deliberate intent in my book.