Does Flickr "Know" if a Hotlinked Image Does Not Link Back to Source?

Posted by Michael Robinson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Michael Robinson
Published on 2010-05-09T15:29:17Z Indexed on 2010/05/09 15:38 UTC
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Filed under:

flickr

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hotlinking

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webcrawling

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php

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.htaccess

From Flickr's community guidelines:

"Do link back to Flickr when you post your photos elsewhere. The Flickr service makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside web sites. However, pages on other web sites that display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo back to its photo page on Flickr."

Our company currently allows image hotlinking for user-uploaded images. It turns out that this has been more popular than we had expected, and I would like to capitalize on this if possible.

We will be altering the guidelines to include a clause similar to Flickr's, quoted above.

As hotlinking costs us, both in terms of server load and bandwidth, we would like to get at least something out of it, other than merely a warm feeling inside.

My question:

Does Flickr "know" if a hotlinked image does not link back to its source?

Bonus: if Flickr knows, how?

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