How to deny direct access to a folder using htaccess

Question

My website is all about images. So I want to find a way to prevent direct access to images folder using (I guess) .htaccess. From what I've read one way is to move the images folder out of the web-root and then add an .htaccess file with the following code:

deny from all

So here are my questions:

• Will I have any problems if I don't move the folder outside the web-root? Because I will have to make a lot of changes to the code in all pages. What's the logic behind moving the images folder outside the web-root?

• Is there any other safe way to do this? I am worrying that If add .htaccess that will deny access to all images then I won't be able to share my pages and use the images in them.

UPDATE:

What about if I use the following code that will prevent hotlinking of my images but will allow it to specific websites.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yordomain2.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yordomain3.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://page-to-redirect [NC,R,L]

Answer 1

I use that for the same problem:

Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
# Only from this website
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https?://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png|bmp)$ - [NC,F]

# To prevent access to crawlers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (?:google|tineye) [NC] 
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [NC,F]

It does not really blocks access to images, but access from other websites pages.

Answer 2

1) Redirect all requests to the image folder to the index.php script using .htaccess:

# Turn rewriting on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
# Redirect requests to index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*\.png$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*\.jpg$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*\.gif$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

2) In your index.php do some logic to determine if the image should be served.

// Do some checking...
$safe = true; // determine if the image should be served
if($safe){
    header("content-type: image/png"); // or gif or jpg
    readfile($_GET['q']);
}

Answer 3

You can add to .htaccess

Options -Indexes

to prevent reviewing of images folder content.

Another way you can put index file to the images folder.

If you publish some images on the pages it's impossible to restrict download of them.

Answer 4

If you move your images folder outside your web root, you don't need that .htaccess. Directories outside your web root can't be accessed from outside.

So you can do both, but not together. Anyways your images can not be used on your site as long they are not accessible. To show an image on your site it has to be 'loadable'.

Hope that helps.