Prevent Image Hotlinking With .htaccess

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Image courtesy of markinns.com

Ever wonder how someone stealing your images, directly taking the URL and display on their own website can effect your bandwidths? This is what we call image hotlinking. With every single view of our images on their site cost us bandwidths. Because it's called directly from our server.

Not sure about you, but I paid for this bandwidths (not for this site). Just like almost everything, there is a way to stop thieves  from stealing our bandwidths without our permission. For those who are wondering, this tutorial is also for WordPressers.

Visit your FTP/File Manager and add following to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain2.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjentSbUVx-fuFCCSHSi_6OL0g8IjaYt5K94H5s5v8jCEd4THGRVviaGxcMc5LOVsmvIpC0AuKe1NK4yNMW6lax31b3K6hhQZM2TBblWoGtSQ_i9jK-e4SvIAw0NuU3Vo5KkO0y2n0rPZ4/s1600/Hotlinking.gif [NC,R,L]

By default all sites are blocked from hotlinking. Only those specified by you are allowed to do so. Don't forget to replace yourdomain.com in above code with your website's URL. You can add as many URLs as you want.

Also the link https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjentSbUVx-fuFCCSHSi_6OL0g8IjaYt5K94H5s5v8jCEd4THGRVviaGxcMc5LOVsmvIpC0AuKe1NK4yNMW6lax31b3K6hhQZM2TBblWoGtSQ_i9jK-e4SvIAw0NuU3Vo5KkO0y2n0rPZ4/s1600/Hotlinking.gif is to a image you’ve set, and whenever image hotlinking is detected, this image will show up. You can change it to your favorite hotlinking message or anything you want. Just make sure where this image is not hotlink protected.

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