Preventing Website Image Hotlinking with .htaccess Settings—and Sneaking in an Ad

For webmasters and bloggers who have painstakingly set up a website or blog, the money spent on server space and traffic for a small operation is already an expense, yet some unscrupulous website developers steal other people’s images to use on their own sites, so that when readers browse their site, the article images are pulled directly from our server. This is what is commonly called image hotlinking.

Besides violating intellectual property rights, these misused images treat our server space as a freely accessible image host, while the outbound traffic brings us no benefit, and we must also absorb the cost loss of traffic rent because of this outbound traffic.

In fact, with just one simple configuration step, images that are hotlinked out can be turned into a warning image. The externally linked images used in the other party’s article can be replaced with the image we want to place.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?vedfolnir.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ ./Vedfolnir-BW-Logo-2021-1200-630.png [R,L]

Please refer to the code above. Just write these three directives into the .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, and in the future, even if an external website misuser directly references a photo from our server’s hard drive in their article, it will be automatically replaced by the web server with the specified image (note: remember to replace the reference image address with your own image address).

Patriots can put up the flag of the Republic of China (mainland piracy sites are very afraid of this), those who want to mess with the other party can specify an 18+ pornographic image, and those who love peace and freedom can advertise their own business—whatever you like.