Hotlinking

Hotlinking is when somebody uses an image that isn’t theirs in another page by linking directly to the image url.

It’s a form of stealing. They don’t have the right to use that image, as it belongs to somebody else. But they are also “stealing bandwidth”. When an image loads, the domain that is hosting it pays for the bandwidth out of their bandwidth limit. If people are visiting your site and seeing your image when they look at your page, then it is worth it to you. But if somebody else puts your image on display elsewhere without telling you, and it loads a lot, you can end up having to pay a big premium or get shut down by your host for exceeding their bandwidth limits.

The only way to find this out is to look at your server records. If you see a lot of hits from some site you don’t have a link on, and the page you have loading is actually an image, you’ve probably found a hotlinker.

One girl found a hotlinker this way. Some meathead had found a full-size image on her site of two girls kissing and was using it as his avatar in an Irish soccer forum. Many forums will upload an image off the web and resize it. This one just resized the image using height and width tags. So the full image was loading for every forum post he wrote, for every viewer who looked at any page he had a post on.

I think a couple of us joined the forum and posted that he did not have the right to do this. He was pretty arrogant about it. And this guy was a moderator! So she changed the name of the photo on her server and replaced it with an advertisement. I sent an email to the admin, who sent me back an apology. I guess there was going to be an email going out to forum members on that.

So first, the image must be hosted on your server so you have control of image names. This won’t work with any other image hosting, as they generate unique image names that you can’t change.

Here’s an image somebody might be using as a background:

Upload a new image you have chosen specially for the thieves. Change the link on your own webpage and rename the original image to match it. Now change the name of the special image, and your chosen image will appear on the site where the hotlink appears.

Like this:

The fun part is that you can put anything you want in there. Somebody who right-clicked your image url to use it may very well not have used height and width tags on that image. So you could substitute a gigantic image for a small one.
Like this:

If the original image is a .gif rather than a .jpg image, you can substitute an animation, which can really get the attention of viewers.
Like this:

Here’s a link to a blog post where the writer got tired of people stealing his content. For him, the issue was not images, but text that other people were stealing. What he did was make a tiny clear .gif image and include it in the code. It did not show, so if somebody stole his text and didn’t realize they were getting an image, they might end up unwittingly hotlinking to it.

Most content thieves don’t do that, but eventually one did. It’s pretty funny when they do. All the author had to do was switch out the tiny, transparent image for one that got his message across.

If you catch someone like this and pull this switcheroo, make sure you take a screenshot so you can show everyone. And if you substitute an animated one, try to get a video screen capture.