How to Disable Image Hotlinking in Apache

What is Image Hotlinking?

To display an image on a website from another website. For example, you have created some stunning images on your website and another user uses that images on their website using your domain link. In this case whenever the other user’s website loads, The image is load from your website. This can increase the hosting cost for you.

This tutorial will help you to prevent image hotlinking on Apache using .htaccess.

Disable Image Hotlinking

Add the following rules in .htaccess of your website. This will block all domains except example.com to hotlink images from your site.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https?://(.+\.)?example.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|png|gif|bmp|tif)$ - [NC,F,L]

You can also show a blocked banner in place of the hot-linked image use below rules in your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https?://(.+\.)?example.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|png|gif|bmp|tif) http://example.com/blocked.png [R,L]

Disable Image Hotlinking for Specific Domains

Sometimes you may need to block image hotlinking from specific domains. The following example will block image hotlinking for the domains blockthis.com and baddomain.net.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?://(.+\.)?blockthis\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?://(.+\.)?baddomain\.net [NC,OR]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|png|gif|bmp|tif)$ - [NC,F,L]