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.
(written 2010-07-23, updated 2010-07-30)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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[194] Published Photographer - (2005-01-30)
[546] The relevance of the hairy woodpecker - (2005-12-28)
[553] Keep that image small - (2006-01-03)
[563] Merging pictures using PHP and GD - (2006-01-13)
[665] PHP Image viewing application - (2006-04-01)
[819] My projector has a photo-id - (2006-07-31)
[937] Display an image from a MySQL database in a web page via PHP - (2006-11-22)
[1087] Telling a story in different ways - (2007-02-20)
[1114] PHP Image upload script - (2007-03-21)
[1185] Themes for the web site - (2007-05-13)
[1188] What shape is your shake? - (2007-05-15)
[1194] Drawing hands on a clock face - PHP - (2007-05-19)
[1396] Using PHP to upload images / Store on MySQL database - security questions - (2007-10-19)
[1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
[1568] What colour is the season? - (2008-03-08)
[1732] Old pictures and comparisons - (2008-08-01)
[1895] Comparison - with and without flash - (2008-11-20)
[2224] Trowbridge - a missed opportunity? Melksham - into the breach? - (2009-06-08)
[2252] Leaping dog, Leaping horse, copyright of old masters - (2009-06-20)
[2592] Re-using our pictures - (2010-01-21)
[3104] Catering in Syracuse, the Saigon Cafe, stolen images and Christmas - (2010-12-25)
[3170] How far is something pictured from the camera? - (2011-02-15)
[3402] That spec is a kingfisher ... - (2011-08-21)
G909 - Well House Consultants - Spam, Spamming and Spammers [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
[268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
[276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
[338] OO techniques are hard to teach - (2005-06-06)
[347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
[417] Telephone Preference Service - we're registered - (2005-08-17)
[495] More spam - a success story - (2005-11-13)
[872] Email metrics - (2006-09-20)
[1037] Impact Engineering and Backscatter - (2007-01-16)
[1115] Unexpected visitors to our site - (2007-03-22)
[1523] Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? - (2008-01-29)
[1532] Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums - (2008-02-05)
[1763] Co-operating to save, yet we dont - (2008-08-21)
[1817] Marc Schneider is still having email trouble - (2008-09-30)
[1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
[2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
[2177] Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up - (2009-05-12)
[2179] Offers that I can refuse - (2009-05-12)
[2276] Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc - (2009-07-10)
[2398] Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson - (2009-09-06)
[2697] Email metrics and filtering - (2010-03-28)
[3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
[3166] Well house is strong - confirmed? - (2011-02-11)
[3190] What do the following web sites have in common? - (2011-03-03)
[3316] Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service - (2011-06-04)
[3352] World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. - (2011-07-09)
[3506] Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches - (2011-11-03)
[3661] Keeping forum and blog comments clean - (2012-03-19)
[3910] Identifying your real customers and keeping them well informed fast - (2012-11-02)
[3912] Sand to Arabia, Coals to Newcastle or Woodburners to Russia - (2012-11-04)
[3946] Moving from a warning system to a control system - PHP, forum spammers - (2012-12-07)
[4135] Introducing your product to Well House Consultants - single, personally tuned email please - (2013-07-08)
[4315] Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers - (2014-11-16)
[4520] No cold sales calls please - but delighted to hear from others! - (2015-09-29)
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