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Disable Hot-Linking of images and other files

Web Hosting Articles » A simple guide to .htaccess » Disable Hot-Linking of images and other files


A hot-linking is when some other site uses images hosted on yours. For example a.com has some pretty nice images. Then b.com decides that instead of hosting these images on their server, they can just link from their pages to the images hosted on site a.com.
Hot-linking usually is bandwidth  and of course content stealing. The b.com site will not pay for the traffic used as the image is being loaded from site a.com.

So it is a good practice to prevent images hot-linking:

You can prevent the hot-linking of your images by creating a .htaccess file with the following content:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?your-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ - [F]

The above code will result in a broken image to be displayed when it is hot-linked.

The example above works for .gif,.jpg and .png files, but you can add any file extension.

If you place the .htaccess file in the main folder of your site it will disable hotlinking for all your site.

To block other type of files, just add their extension to the list above. For example to block movie files:

RewriteRule \.(mov|avi|wmv|mpe?g)$ - [F]

The Hot-Linking prevention is based on an Apache module called ModRewrite. So your web host should support it in order for you to be able to use these on your site.

We will be discussing ModRewrite in a separate topic.


  1. How to block users from accessing your site based on their IP address
  2. How to prevent or allow directory listing?
  3. How to change the error documents – 404 Page Not Found, etc
  4. Using .htaccess for password protecting your folders
  5. Using .htaccess to block referrer spam
  6. Disable Hot-Linking of images and other files
  7. Redirect URLs using .htaccess
  8. Introduction to mod_rewrite and some basic examples
  9. Force SSL/https using .htaccess and mod_rewrite
  10. 301 Permanent redirects for parked domain names
  11. Enable CGI, SSI with .htaccess
  12. How to add Mime-Types using .htaccess
  13. Change default directory page
  14. Block Bad robots, spiders, crawlers and harvesters
  15. Make PHP to work in your HTML files with .htacess
  16. Change PHP variables using .htaccess
  17. HTTP Authentication with PHP running as CGI/SuExec
  18. Force www vs non-www to avoid duplicate content on Google
  19. Duplicate content fix index.html vs / (slash only)

Comments 4 >>

GeekGrrl Said,
Feb 02, 2007 @ 00:03

Thanx so much for the all the info and instructions!

How would you write the above if you wanted to block everyone but Google and have the result be a replacement image?
GSW Said,
Oct 08, 2010 @ 14:56

How would this script be modified so more than one domain can access it? I have setup the following but if I try to access a WP-content/Gallery it is blocking the request. I took the example and just added another set of scripts for the second domain. I should mention this is a WP3.0 networked site being run with one.com as the main domain. The second domain is a sub-domain two.one.com. I also have other sites running on a totally separate domain say: three.com Basically I just want the galleries accessible to the various blogs.
_____________________________________________
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.one.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.one.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://one.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://one$" locally_linked=1

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.two.one.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.two.one.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://two.one.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://two.one.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" locally_linked=1


Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked

______________________________________________________________________________

Thanks
Brad Said,
Feb 16, 2011 @ 19:42

Note, GSW example is incorrect, as u need to escape the .

so it should be:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www\.one\.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www\.one\.com$" locally_linked=1
etc...
Hanan Said,
Apr 12, 2011 @ 00:28

is it possible to block a website that is linking to my blog?
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