Thanks for the Info Joshua I will read it and see what I can learn, although I have a couple things to point out. The solution Im looking for was not originally intended to stop hot linking, but simply, just as a way to have pictures in a private folders that could only be accessed by a specific user. Lets say someone uploads a picture to their private page, no body should be able to access that picture but the owner of that picture. without any kind of security anyone can type the picture folder + name and access it like this www.website.com/images/image1.jpg. And so I started doing some research and I have found lots of places and articles that suggest that for my prloblem I should just use a folder outside of the root of my domain. The way everyone talks about it seems like it should be a simple thing, like something that shouldnt be hard. Yet I cant do it. Just as a final note, I have been able to access files outside the root, files like .php by
using include() to call those files. We where even able to open jpgs as binary and convert them back to jpgs with some php functions. Yet we should need to do this for all the secure images in my website. I know there has to be other ways to achieve this.
----- Original Message ----
From: Joshua Slive <joshua@xxxxxxxx>
To: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 1:22:16 PM
Subject: Re: image folder outside the root....how to access it ?
On 9/25/07, Daniel Yaÿfffffffffff1ez <daniel_wachy84@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello everyone, I have been trying to make this work but so far I havent been able to successfully load an image (or other media file) that is in a folder outside the root of my domain. I initially wanted to do this in order to be able to deliver this images from code running inside my serer, but to prevent people from linking directly to the image (or file) using the address bar (example: http://www.fakedomain.com/images/image1.jpg).
>
> I know it might be possible to achieve this using an .htaccess but I heard they are a little bit unsecure plus the slow down the server. (in the apache website they reccomend not using it).
>
> My problem is that whenever I try to link to an image outise the root it simply will not work. For example lets say my fictional root folder is this one: www/var/public_html/ and lets just say the index of my website then is this: www/var/public_html/index.html now lets just say I want to put my images in a folder located outside the root, like this: www/images/image1.jpg etc. I should be able to link to the image like this from my index.html file: ../images/image1.jpg but it doesnt work. Ive tried several combinations but nothing seems to work.
>
> My question to you guys is if you know what apache setting needs to be turned on (or off) to enable this? or how should I link to images outside the root.
>
> Thanks in advanced and I hope anyone here can help me because I have looked in a lot of places with no success. Thanks again !!!
>
You've got a fundamental problem here: If the image file is not
accessible from the web, then it can't be embedded in an html page. In
order for the image to be displayed as part of the html page, the
browser makes a separate request for the image that, to the server,
looks identical to a request for the image alone (with the important
exception of the content of the Referer HTTP request header). Putting
the images outside the root is not, in itself, a problem. You can
simply use an Alias to map them into the webspace so they are
accessible from the web. But this will not help your direct linking
problem.
Here's my suggestion: 1. Check to see if you really have a direct
linking problem. Is this really causing you serious problems? Can you
fix it just by occasionally changing the name of your image file? 2.
If you decide you really need to prevent hotlinking/embedding of your
images in external pages, use one of the suggestions here:
http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/DisableImageHotLinking
Note that neither of these require the use of .htaccess.
Joshua.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story. Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games.
http://sims.yahoo.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project.
See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info.
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
" from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|