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Hi Eric If I were you, I'd replace your "first home" picture with one showing a condemned property (e.g. http://www.annistonstar.com/gallery/2004/year_end/2004_sg45.jpg) so that it appears on their web site. If you have admin access, then you can usually set up rules to limit which referring sites can directly use your images. In my spare time I run a fairly popular DVD site and I often get ebay vendors linking directly to DVD cover scans. So, I set up an Apache rule that should replace the image with one that suggests that if the vendor is happy to steal someone else's bandwidth they might also by happy to steal your money :-) regards Dave Pattern Library Systems Manager Computing & Library Services University of Huddersfield > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On > Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan > Sent: 31 March 2006 13:08 > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] external linking to your images > > Yep, this is exactly what is happening. > > People are linking to images directly from my site. They are > sort of "hijacking" the images, and when loaded they use my > hard disk, my processing power, and my network connection to > make it happen. This reduces the amount of resources for my > machine's more primary tasks. Mind you, it would be difficult > for me to measure the resource usage, and as a librarian, I > might say, "So what?" On the other hand sometimes people make > fun of me and my images. Other times the images are put into > an undesirable context too gross to even mention on a mailing list. > > Here is a less inocuous instance. Below is a URL. It > describes some sort of mortgage service. On the page is a > picture of a house. I took that picture and titled it "first > home". When you search Google Images for "first home" this > picture shows up as item #2: > http://www.dynastymortgageteam.com/ To what degree are the people at dynastymortgageteam.com taking advantage of me and the system? To what degree are the norms of Internet behavior too new to determine the answer to that question? What about those other people who link to me for "personal use?" While it isn't scholarship, maybe I should be "cited" and have a link back to my home page and be granted attribution. Does anybody else remember an Internet adage that said, "If you don't want it copied, then don't put it on the Internet." These are things I wonder about. Finally, I consider refusing to serving images to external referrer's, but again, some of my professional ethics get in the way. (BTW, how would I go about doing such a thing?) -- Eric Morgan This transmission is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you receive it in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and remove it from your system. If the content of this e-mail does not relate to the business of the University of Huddersfield, then we do not endorse it and will accept no liability.