Protecting your images from online theft

This tutorial is for girls with websites.

Here’s the problem. When you have an online directory without an index page (index.html, index.htm, index.php, etc.), many hosts will helpfully create one for you – or for a surfer who happens to be looking for one.

What this means is that if you have a folder full of photos and you give or sell the address of one of them to someone, they can go hunting through to see what else you’ve got there in that folder.

Here’s an unprotected directory.

Maybe you sold Image1.gif to a customer, or maybe this person knows your site domain name and is just guessing you have an ‘images’ folder. Most people do have a folder named ‘/images/ on their site. So they can type in any of the following:

• http://yoursite.com/images/index.html
• http://yoursite.com/images/index.htm
• http://yoursite.com/images/index.php
  or even just
• http://yoursite.com/images/

which assumes you have some kind of index page there and will produce it for him. Here’s what will come up on many webhosts when you don’t have an index page of any kind:

These are clickable links. If you had folders in that directory, they would appear, and he could click down to see what was in them, too. He can open any image he wants and save it, stealing all your images because you left your directories wide open to view.

On your website, create a new directory. Put an image in it, but no index page. Then type the url to the directory only to see what comes up. If you get a page like the default directory above, you need to fix this now.

Some girls will put a blank page in directories and folders, which certainly will stop unwanted visitors from figuring out what’s inside, and without the file name, they can’t access any of your files. I have made pages with “naughty boy” messages that redirected to my homepage after allowing time to read.

[At this point I will add that there are those who say that having html redirects (which this is) will hurt your ranking with Google. There are many things that are said to hurt your ranking. It is extremely unclear what does and what does not. The bots are pretty smart. I think if it's clear you're doing something to trick your way up in search standings, you run the risk that your site may get in trouble over it. But if you're not trying to do that, you will probably be ok.]

An html redirect will send who lands on your page to another url in a timeframe you specify. Undoubtedly you have seen pages with a message saying, “The page has moved. You will be redirected …blahblahblah.” You can do that yourself and redirect the surfer to your homepage or any other url you want to send them to.

Here’s the code:

<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.the-domain-you-want-to-redirect-to.com”>

where you replace the number ’0′ with the number of seconds you want them to linger on the page before they are redirected.

But I got tired of that. The only people arriving at that page are thieves. Why be nice, why not just redirect them directly to my callbutton url?

Since the surfer is immediately sent to your callbutton. Take your sid right out of the callbutton code niteflirt gives you.

Click on the image to open the text file. Copy it, edit to put in your listing sid code, then resave as an .html file. Upload into any or all of your directories that have no index.html file of their own.