Asked 9 years, 9 months ago. Active 9 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 8k times. What exactly is hotlinking? And why do people say you shouldn't do it? Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. It is considered poor netiquette to hotlink for the following reasons: You are consuming another site's resources for your own benefit. The downsides of hotlinking are also its advantages: If the author updates the asset, your hotlink is updated as well.
Improve this answer. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta. Alternatively referred to as inline linking , hotlinking is the action of linking to an object on another server.
For example, many people who are learning to create their web page may link to an image on another server, which helps make creating their page easier. However, hotlinking is not recommended as it may violate the image Copyright and it also steals bandwidth from the server hosting the image.
Instead of hotlinking objects, if permission is granted, copy the image from their server to your server or another free image hosting service. Other techniques seek to game fellow site owners. One such technique is hotlinking. Hotlinking is the act of linking to a file that is hosted on another site, instead of downloading the file, hosting it on your own server, and providing proper citation. Images are most frequently hotlinked, but audio files, movies, flash animations, and other digital assets can also be hotlinked.
Others go further and call it theft. Since he owned and hosted the multiple images that made up the comic, he decided to replace them with a note and a screenshot of his monthly hosting bill.
Image Source. To avoid running into a similar situation as Inman, you can take steps to prevent websites from hotlinking files hosted on your website. Below is a variety of preventive and reactive measures you can take to stop users from hotlinking your files.
Doing so can help protect your bandwidth and optimize your website performance. The easiest and safest way to prevent hotlinking is to use a CDN that offers built-in hotlinking protection. For example, Cloudflare offers hotlink protection to prevent other websites from linking to your image resources or abusing your bandwidth. Once enabled, this feature will block websites from linking directly to your image resources.
They can still view and download images from your website, however. That means they could properly download, host, and cite images from your website. To prevent hotlinking on your site, you can add the following snippet of code to your hypertext access file. To hotlink an image, users can right click the image, copy the image address, and embed the URL onto their site. To prevent hotlinking, it would make sense to disable the right click functionality then.
Or would it? Some users will easily be able to work around this obstacle if they really want to hotlink your images.
But it may stop users who would have unintentionally hotlinked, or done so without any malicious intent. In that case, it might be worth trying to reduce the total number of image copies on your site. A more user-friendly solution than preventing all users from right clicking on your images is to add a watermark to your images and other media objects. While your website will likely contain a copyright notice in your website footer , you can emphasize your ownership of your content by adding a text watermark to all your images or the most popular.
This watermark can simply include your name, logo, or the copyright trademark and year. Or it can include more information, including the penalty that will be enforced if a user hotlinks or otherwise misuses your private property. You can use a free tool like Watermarkly , or a premium tool like Adobe Lightroom Classic to add watermarks in bulk.
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