Protect your images from being hotlinked in WordPress

Many bloggers often tend to add few images to their posts to grab the reader’s attention. Images are always effective to make your readers understand few things which you cannot express in words. Sometimes, your user may find them so useful or interesting, that they even like to share it with others on forum or their blog. But few people will just copy the direct image link for sharing instead of linking it to the post. While few others try to steal your images and it is called as bandwidth theft. Either way, it will start consuming more bandwidth on your hosting account. Also, they not just steal your bandwidth, but also your image’s search engine ranking. So you lose both traffic as well as bandwidth.

Solution?

There are many ways avoid images from being hotlinked, but on WordPress, there is an easiest way to do it with a bunch of other goodies. And that is by using a mighty plugin called “PictPocket“. So install the plugin from your wordpress’s inbuilt plugin installer or install it manually via FTP by download it.

What to do after installing?

Configuration:

After installing it, you can see the PictPocket in the left pane of wordpress admin panel at the bottom. Go to “Overview” and you see this:

Click on “Auto Configuration” button to configure the .htacess file.

Set the “Don’t Hotlink” image:

Create a image with message not to hotlink image (something like this) from your blog and upload it to your server and provide the URL in custom images under “Options” and save it.

What happens next?

After you do all those stuff, you are almost done. Now whenever someone hotlinks an image which is present on your wordpress’s “Uploads” folder in wp-content, you can see it in “Hotlinks” page of PictPocket with details like who has hotlinked with a link to the page containing your hotlinked image and a count with how many times your image has been viewed on the site where it has been hotlinked. Now you can block those sites where your images are being hotlinked.

Click to view large image.

PictPocket will then add those links to it’s blacklist and the your actual image which was hotlinked will be replaced with the image containing the message not to hotlink your images! Cool isn’t it?

That’s all. If you have any question, do let me know in the comment.