Ravens PHP Scripts - How to deter image and bandwidth theft

Lately I’ve been finding more and more people lifting images directly from my blog and using them on their own websites (a practice known as hotlinking). Not only is this stealing, but each time someone visits the page that hotlinks my image(s), it drains the bandwidth I’m paying my web host for.

With a little .htaccess wizardry, anyone stealing my images now has a web page like so (click the image for a larger version):

more David Airey