Hotlinking is a practice which is generally considered a nuisance, because it means someone is using both your content and bandwidth without necessarily asking or giving credit.

I’m quite ok with people copying images from my site as long as they don’t try to pass them off as their own (and provided they give credit where appropriate). What’s more problematic is when people link directly to an image hosted on my server, because while it might at first seem more "legal", ie there is no actual copying going on, in truth it’s just kind of annoying because it costs me bandwidth.

Some webmasters respond rather aggressively to hotlinking, setting up scripts to return obscene or abusive images. This is a totally idiotic way to deal with the problem, not least because there are bona fide reasons why an image might be linked from another server. For example, a user might see an image on my site (say a diagram) and post a hyperlink to it in a comment or forum, in order to illustrate a point. This seems like fair use to me, and I think it would be very rude (although in some cases amusing) if this image was automatically replaced with a picture of a horse’s penis and the word THIEF in block letters. It’s also an entirely inappropriate solution for blogs, since RSS feeds mean you can never know where an image might be accessed from.

So I’ve tried to come up with a mature compromise, to mitigate my bandwidth loss without being an asshole about it. To this end I have added a script which will limit the sizes of images requested remotely (currently to a maximum dimension of 256 pixels), also adding a small caption at the bottom to indicate where the image is hosted. The image is not obscured by the caption, and simply copying the link will allow you to obtain the original.

This means that from now on images being hotlinked from other sites will be [slightly] modified into mini banner ads— everybody wins! (except people who hotlinked to animated gifs— they’re screwed)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.