Image Protection Help

[Shalazar]

I run as site principally based on images. The rewrite engine works fine for preventing hotlinking. However, now people are posting the direct link to the photos, and giving the advice to cut and paste it into the browser address bar, which does indeed work. This naturally bypasses the picture script, and the subsequent ad impressions.

Any htaccess or other help you could provide on denying outside access to the images in the directories themselves without comprimising display within the site itself?

Thanks!

[MTDesigns]

Would this thread (http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10255) help you?

[Shalazar]

No I don't believe that thread helps at all. Using mod_rewrite, I already have a solution to prevent direct hotlinking of photos. The pictures cannot be referenced iny form on outsite sites.

However, what I have now is people posting full URLs for my photos. You can enter that URL into the address bar of the browser and get the photo by itself. And that part is what I am looking to additionally protect.

So if you type www.mysite.com/photos/photo1.jpg in your address bar, you don't get squat.

Any ideas would greatly help.

[Arthur]

So if you type www.mysite.com/photos/photo1.jpg in your address bar, you don't get squat. That's impossible because of the way the web works. Some things you could do;
- make Flash files out of the photos. Will prevent saving them as images.
- use a Java applet to display them. Ditto
- put photos outside your www tree and serve them through a PHP script (with fpassthru). This will stop people saving the original image (IE saves it as .bmp). Additionally: Set your site up with sessions; if there's no session-id, they have not visited your site - don't display photo.

[Dart]

I wonder what the point of getting to your pics from a direct link is for the visitors? Will they get more that way than by following a link like http://www.charisma-carpenter.com/cgi-bin/show/show.cgi?103 ? Hardly any, except for the "fun" of bypassing your ad impression script. But this seem to work very fast.
Are you sure your'e not exaggerating the problem, that actually rather few uses these direct image links?

Well, what you could do is to make sure that the scripted links to the bigger images offers more than the barebone links. You could switch the current "Back"-button to a button that links to the gallery the image is a part of? Thus giving easy access to the rest of the pics you offer. Then you could talk back at the relevant forums.