Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-07-23 07:24:07 - Graham Ellis
Looking through my web server logs earlier this week, I was surprised to see a considerable number of downloads of our images from sites that I had never heard of, and exploring those sites I found that they display - how shall I put it - material that we do not want to associate with. Our images - along with many, many others, are being (ab)used to provide a veil or respectability and to pump up link counts.
So I have updated our image system - and if these sites call up images from us as part of their content in the future, they'll simply be displaying this rather boring panel which I hope shows a degree of dis-assosiation and disapproval. I note that some of the big image sites have taken a similar action!
I found it very interesting, though, to see which pictures were being hotlinked from us (in contravention of copyright, it should be noted!) ... here are the most visited ones for the last two days.
Our Dog Gypsy
A display of food at a hotel exxhibition in London
Atherstone, in the West Midlands
Heaven's Gate, Longleat
View from Portland to Weymouth and the Chesil Beach
In spite of my discouraging this particular use of our images, I am very happy for them to be used quite widely with prior permission - see [here] for full details.
Technical note for anyone else who is looking to suppress use of their images on sites like dearcomputer and prarllolitas - our images are all served from a MySQL database and I have modified the script to replace the normal image with the "forbidden" one if the referrer site name includes these strings. If your iamges are served directly through the Apache http server, you could also use mod_rewrite to redirect the requests to your chosen replacement image.
So I have updated our image system - and if these sites call up images from us as part of their content in the future, they'll simply be displaying this rather boring panel which I hope shows a degree of dis-assosiation and disapproval. I note that some of the big image sites have taken a similar action!
Our Dog Gypsy
A display of food at a hotel exxhibition in London
Atherstone, in the West Midlands
Heaven's Gate, Longleat
View from Portland to Weymouth and the Chesil Beach