I was cruising through my server stats a few nights ago, as I do every few months when I remember that I can. It makes for a few minutes of interesting reading. And it’s the only clue I have that people are stealing my photos and my bandwidth.

What I noticed was that a French pet adoption website was loading something many hundreds of times a day, completely dwarfing everything else happening on my site. The webmaster had apparently set the background image on every page to load a photo from my server. And the particular photo? Well, you see, a couple of years ago, I wrote a StrPrpn post about blanketing my cubicle at work with hundreds of pictures of kittens (don’t ask). And so I found this picture on the web somewhere, copied it to my server, and stuck it in a post:

It’s not my picture. I’m not attached to it. But when a web designer sets it as the background image on another website and it gets loaded many hundreds of times a day, that bandwidth can really add up. So I composed a polite email to the person, in French. Well, that’s not true. I composed it in English and then fed it to Google Translate. I studied French once, long ago. If you’d like me to translate any Rousseau for you, or perhaps some Flaubert or Pascal, I could possibly do it. But compose a straightforward email asking someone to stop linking to a picture on my website? You don’t learn the words for that stuff reading 18th century philosophy. And C was studying, so I didn’t want to bother her to translate it. So I fed it to Google Translate, which does a passable job. It probably came across sounding a bit like this to the French person at the other end:

Hello, excuse please my french bad.

You use a picture of my web site as your foundation. Near half of bandwidth is used as readers of your Web site load this file on my server. The image is not up to me, so I do not worry if you move to your server. But do not please link to my site. The image that you link is:

http://www.strangeproportion.com/images/friends1024X768.jpg.

It is kittens.

Thank you.

I never got a response, and after a few days, I checked again and saw that this picture was still being loaded hundreds of times a day. So I decided to activate the .htaccess. This is a file you can put on your website to control what gets served up in response to various types of requests. With a little internet research, I figured out how to set it up to serve up a substitute picture when anyone links to an image file that’s stored on my server.

I spent a while trying to pick just the right substitute. I have some funny anti-Bush stuff lying around, and some inappropriate humor and whatnot. But these seemed like overkill. I wanted to send a clear message—“Hey, quit linking to my photo”—but do it with a sense of humor. I wanted to be on the edge of inappropriate without veering into lewd or tasteless.

Google had some choice images in response to my “hairy man in a speedo” query, and after perusing a few pages of hairy men, I found that one that called my name. David Hasselhoff in a speedo with a bright red background. What more could you ask for?

I grabbed it, loaded it up, and then checked the results. As perfect as I could have hoped. I was very pleased with myself.

(Click for a better view.)

They’ve since taken the picture down. But for at least a few hours, I bet there were a few French potential pet adopters who were a bit confused.