private files in drupal 6

Question

I have a sub directory in my files directory which I want to store private images. I display the images with their watermark, via the imagecache modules.

I thought I could make the directory (with the original images) hidden to the public simply by dropping an .htaccess file in the folder, with

deny from all

but the files are still publicly accessible. What am I missing?

Answer 1

If you want to basically prevent hotlinking images, you can try the following in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]