What Is an Image Hijack?

When the webmaster of one website directly links to an image on another, so that the image appears on his own website, he is hijacking the image---or image hotlinking. The practice, which consumes bandwidth of the image's original home website, is considered a nuisance.

Definition

Many online forums and message boards make it easy for users to show pictures from external, third-party sites. When this is done, every time that image is loaded on that site, it is actually drawing bandwidth from the site where it originates, since it was not saved locally to the site where it is being viewed.

Considerations

Although image hijacking is not illegal, webmasters and web developers consider it a very rude practice. Bandwidth costs money, and the bandwidth taken away by image hijacking can often lead to increased bills.

Prevention/Solution

If images are being hijacking, some web developers or webmasters will manually move or rename the pictures, breaking the old links to them. To prevent further hijacking, however, the code must be rewritten to ensure that images may not be remotely hosted.

References

• ATI Lab: So you have decided to hotlink images and steal bandwidth
• Weborial: Save bandwidth by stopping image-hijacking - both .htaccess and httpd.conf methods

Resources

• Javascript Kit: Preventing hot linking of images and other file types