Image Host Trickery Possible? :)

Hi there.

Let me briefly explain the situation before I ask the question.

I run a small image host. I have a good amount of people using my services for legitimate purposes. However, I have a few people who themselves own web sites, and use my image host to host images on their website.

Now I have emailed some of these website owners who use a good amount of my resources. I asked them to either take down the images, or maybe a deal can be reached where they can place a link to my site in exchange for the hosting.

None of them have emailed me back, so instead of merely deleting the image, I decided to replace the image with my website logo.

Now my HTML question is, is it possible to actually place a link to my site whenever an image is called on from theirs?

In other words, if a website calls on hostedimage.jpg from my server, could I have that file actually be an html file or something and bring up a link?

I'm pretty sure this is not possible, and downright silly. But it could be a great trick if it did work.

Thanks,
Nudge

What's the point of running an image hosting service if you're going to complain that *gasp* people are using images they uploaded on your site on their website.

I don't mind if they use my images for something useful. The websites I contacted are using it for their layout, and for their main content which takes a considerable amount of bandwidth.

My image host is intended for people who would like to share their images, not use my hosting in order to reduce bandwidth on their site and increase their profit!?

So in essence, they aren't merely sharing hosted images, they are stealing bandwidth.

Can you make an image into a link, no.

Put in your ToS that the images cannot be used for layouts, etc. then you're free to delete them if they're used in that way.

or place a bandwidth per image ration in there so there service gets cut if the image is used to much, or direct them to my image hosting site in my sig, i simply don't care about bandwidth, im already having 100+ gb a month of bandwidth usage.

I think there are ways to prevent hotlinking and replacing their image with an image that you specified. I've seen this in many places. Just google it and you should find something.

I believe I saw a tutorial about this on nettuts.com

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ot...ess-solutions/

Originally Posted by BrownEyes I think there are ways to prevent hotlinking and replacing their image with an image that you specified. I've seen this in many places. Just google it and you should find something.

Problem with preventing hotlinking is that if a legitimate user links an image for say use on a forum, he will then get that hotlink protection used against him.

if you set it up so images can only be viewed or downloaded through a specific PHP module and a database, using some kind of hashed file names and using htaccess to restrict access to the actual image folders that would work!

How about giving accounts a maximum bandwidth usage amount?