Webmasters Stack Exchange
Webmasters Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [hotlinking]

Hotlinking is when you directly use (e.g. embed/display/link) a file (such as an image, movie, audio file, flash animation, or any other digital asset) that is hosted on another site.

Hotlinking is when you directly use (e.g. embed/display/link) a file (such as an image, movie, audio file, flash animation, or any other digital asset) that is hosted on another site. See also Hotlinking: what is it, and why shouldn't people do it?

36 questions
18
votes
2 answers

Hotlinking: what is it, and why shouldn't people do it?

What exactly is hotlinking? And why do people say you shouldn't do it?
user6901
12
votes
2 answers

How do you hot link an external image from a Media Wiki site?

What is the syntax for showing an externally hosted image in a media wiki page? The media wiki help page doesn't seem to cover that scenario. I've tried several things that don't…
Stephen Ostermiller
  • 99,822
  • 18
  • 143
  • 364
8
votes
5 answers

Is in-line linking (hot linking) photos and videos OK on my website, or is it unfair to the site which hosts them?

I am interested in hearing the community's thoughts about "in-line linking". That is, the act of embedding photo/video/written content into a particular website via code, such that a website can provide a frame to a host website's server content.…
Peter R.B.
  • 81
  • 1
  • 4
6
votes
1 answer

Htaccess Hotlinking Prevention: Exclude a specific image from rule

I have a working hotlinking prevention in the .htaccess. Everything works fine. However, I use an image of my website in email signature. After the hotlinking prevention, this image is now displayed in old mails also with the placeholder image (the…
dajana.s
  • 161
  • 9
5
votes
3 answers

How do I get watermarked versions of images indexed in Google search but allow users to see clean high quality images once on my site?

I have a site where much of the focus are the images themselves. When people visit the website directly (with an AdSense ad shown), the image shows in normal high-quality. When robots visit the image, they will see a watermarked version. The reason…
Mike -- No longer here
  • 13,650
  • 5
  • 29
  • 63
5
votes
2 answers

Prevent Google from listing hotlinked images for other sites

I am hosting several domains on my server and hotlink images accross various domains. However, I have found out that in Google searches, the images are listed as originating on the site where the image is displayed (but not hosted!). This can lead…
richey
  • 285
  • 1
  • 8
5
votes
2 answers

Is it bad to hotlink images hosted on googleusercontent.com?

When copy-pasting content from Google Docs into our CMS, images are hotlinked to lh3.googleusercontent.com. Most images on that page (except the first one) are linked in this way. Is there any problems with leaving them like this? It is quite time…
Rob
  • 106
  • 4
4
votes
1 answer

Prevent image hotlinking from Amazon S3 and while allowing social networks

I'm using Amazon S3 to host some assets (mostly images) on a small project. I'm trying to find a way to prevent leeching (which can be very serious should someone tried to use a network of bots to shoot my bill to the stars). My current approach is…
K.D.
  • 41
  • 2
4
votes
2 answers

prevent hotlinking of off-site content?

I have a www.example.com site where I serve all static content (e.g. http.//www.example.com/image.jpg) off a CDN with URLs like http://static.example.com/image.jpg An Apache 2 .htaccess rule prohibits non-empty, non-example.com referrals:
blau
  • 143
  • 3
4
votes
2 answers

How to stop access of a PHP file from other sites

I read somewhere about hot linking of images. Preventing image hot linking helps to stop bandwidth theft from your site. Would it work for a PHP file? In my case, I am using a PHP file to generate thumbnails from an image. I don't want others to…
Amit Kumar Gupta
  • 1,228
  • 1
  • 9
  • 18
4
votes
1 answer

Hotlinking to reduce bandwidth usage?

I manage two websites for a client, each hosted with a different company. One site is an eCommerce site and the other is a blog for the eCommerce site. The eCommerce site is reaching its bandwidth limits (25GB/month), while the blog has plenty of…
Michael
  • 67
  • 1
  • 4
4
votes
2 answers

How is anti-hotlinking done?

In website terms, hotlinking is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located. What does…
Lazer
  • 141
  • 3
3
votes
2 answers

Not able to stop hotlink

I am using following htaccess code to stop hot linking my image files Options +FollowSymlinks Options +SymlinksIfOwnerMatch RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?article-stack.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}…
Amit Kumar Gupta
  • 1,228
  • 1
  • 9
  • 18
3
votes
2 answers

Image hotlinking providers?

I use a lot of images in my wordpress and due to hosting restrictions I need to host the images somewhere else and hotlink them in my blog posts. So I am looking for some reliable image host which provides free hotlinking service. The Google Picasa…
Josh
  • 39
  • 1
  • 2
3
votes
1 answer

How to preventing massive hotlinking of images before Apache?

A very popular website has begun using my Flickrshow javascript slideshow, but failed to notify me beforehand, and so is using a version that downloads the images used from my server. This is resulting in my server being inundated with 100+ requests…
beseku
  • 131
  • 2
1
2 3