I did not know how to stop people stealing images from this blog a few months ago.

As a newbie on wordpress blogging, i really did not know how this terrible thing works.

I was just concentrated on creating contents, and thinking naive, i did not know people copy or steal other bloggers’s idea, such of that stuff, including people stealing images from a blog to theirs.

I am sure some of you also do not know that someone can steal your blog images, or pictures by copy the URL of your images and paste it in their blogs.

You would not get any notifications for images thief, however you can avoid or take an action if someone copy your blog’s content.

This stealing images thing is called hotlinking. We have to stop people stealing images from our blogs.

Images hotlinking, stop people stealing images, it is not good for your blog.

Yes, it is not good when lots of people do hotlinking to your blog without your consent.

Two obvious reasons why i said it is not good for you and your blog when people do this to you.

1. Your hard works are being copied by lazy people that should create their own stuff.

It’s the feeling of blogging that i have encountered, i did feel, it was not fair. But it is Internet, people do that often.

2. They do steal your pictures, it also means they do steal your bandwidth.

I know some wordpress hosting promises unlimited bandwidth and those stuff, but do not believe that right away. If i read some people’s honest reviews on forums, people blogs have been suspended because they use too much bandwidth on the web server.

So imagine, you rent a web space, it is like renting a house, and someone steals the electricity source from your house without your consent, of course you have to pay the bill.

It is the same happening with this situation, your blog images should be used by YOU, and not other blog owners, they should use theirs too. We have to stop people stealing images from our websites.

Video tutorial and steps how to stop people stealing images from your blog with htaccess.

I have noticed many times that people steal my content, they do duplicate my content in their sites, and i usually will defend it.  Here is the example of the content thief. http://www.helmiikhwanul.co.cc/activate-our-wordpress-rss-with-feedburner .

Very obvious that this blog copied my article + stealing images and my video of my wordpress rss feedburner post: http://www.blog.web6.org/rss-with-feedburner/

Looks like he removed the images, but still has my video.

My video is stolen and pasted in another website.

NOTE: Backup your htaccess file first before your follow this tutorial, very dangerous messing up with htaccess file, if you don’t know how to do it, hire someone.

Video tutorial how we can stop people stealing images:

Steps:

1. I assume you already backed up your htaccess file by saving it in your computer. (you can watch the video straight how to backup htaccess file).

2. Once you can the copy of your htaccess file, click “edit” button in your cPanel to open and edit this document.

3. Every blogs have different content of htaccess, but you should add this code on the bottom of your htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?blog.web6\.org/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|mov)$ http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/1421/blogweb6.jpg [L]

Screenshot after i added it:

The highlighted area is the place where you should paste the code above.

Replace the line :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?blog.web6\.org/ [NC]

with your own domain, example your domain is www.yourdomain.com this line should be:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yourdomain\.com/ [NC]

And replace this image path, to your own image, which you want it to appear whenever people steal your pictures, or movie.

http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/1421/blogweb6.jpg

Save the htaccess file.

Now test it with your other blog if you have one, or install wordpress locally to experiment this.

That’s it, i hope the video tutorial of how to stop people stealing images from your blog can be useful.