External Linking, from where?

SteveM

Hey guys,

I use Stat Counter, Google Analytics and Smugmug's stat feature to keep an eye on my site, areas of interest, etc. Smugmug is great in that it lists all the hits regardless of where they're from, but gives little information. My dilema is, I have some photos that have 30+ hits, while the others in the gallery are in the single digits, so I suspect these photos are being externally linked since I really can't find that much interest in them through Stat Counter (as with direct linking, no web page exists to place the Stat Counter/Analytics code on to track with). Is there any way to figure out where these are being linked from? And I know some of you really go wholeheartedly at protecting your copyrights, and find (miraculously) your photos being used elsewhere on the web. How do you do it? Most of my photos I donate the use of to noble clubs and schools, but I'd just like to make sure, and make sure proper credit is being given.

Thanks for reading,
Steve
www.downriverphotography.com
stevem01.smugmug.com

Mike Lane

SteveM wrote:

Hey guys,

I use Stat Counter, Google Analytics and Smugmug's stat feature to keep an eye on my site, areas of interest, etc. Smugmug is great in that it lists all the hits regardless of where they're from, but gives little information. My dilema is, I have some photos that have 30+ hits, while the others in the gallery are in the single digits, so I suspect these photos are being externally linked since I really can't find that much interest in them through Stat Counter (as with direct linking, no web page exists to place the Stat Counter/Analytics code on to track with). Is there any way to figure out where these are being linked from? And I know some of you really go wholeheartedly at protecting your copyrights, and find (miraculously) your photos being used elsewhere on the web. How do you do it? Most of my photos I donate the use of to noble clubs and schools, but I'd just like to make sure, and make sure proper credit is being given.

Thanks for reading,
Steve
www.downriverphotography.com
stevem01.smugmug.com

You do know that you can disable external linking in your gallery settings right?

No there is no way for you to figure out who is hotlinking your images. But with only 30 views either the site that is hotlinking your photos isn't very popular or you are the one that is viewing your photos (which counts in your viewed image count). Either way I wouldn't think that is such a big deal. What you could do is use a custom watermark (assuming you have a pro level account) on all your images so it is clear where they are from in the case that they are hotlinked.

SteveM

Yep, I realize I can disable external linking, but I encourage it. I could lock down the site tight, disable external linking, right click saving, password everything and watermark it all. I think there's actually code out there that will burn out your retinas if you LOOK at a photo too long. But, I want the right people to make use of my work. I think I will try experimenting with custom watermarking to see how unobtrusive I can get it, while still identifying the photo. And yeah, I realize 30 views of a single photo isn't earthshattering, but some of them were only days old at the time, and 30 views through a small club's website could be every member of that club, and I'd like them to know who their club photographer is! Thanks Mike, I'll start on developing a jazzy custom watermark.

Any other advice from those that might use webcrawlers or whatever to find their work on the web?

Steve
www.downriverphotography.com

jfriend

Could Smugmug do this?

SteveM wrote:

Hey guys,

I use Stat Counter, Google Analytics and Smugmug's stat feature to keep an eye on my site, areas of interest, etc. Smugmug is great in that it lists all the hits regardless of where they're from, but gives little information. My dilema is, I have some photos that have 30+ hits, while the others in the gallery are in the single digits, so I suspect these photos are being externally linked since I really can't find that much interest in them through Stat Counter (as with direct linking, no web page exists to place the Stat Counter/Analytics code on to track with). Is there any way to figure out where these are being linked from? And I know some of you really go wholeheartedly at protecting your copyrights, and find (miraculously) your photos being used elsewhere on the web. How do you do it? Most of my photos I donate the use of to noble clubs and schools, but I'd just like to make sure, and make sure proper credit is being given.

This is a relatively common question. As long as there are bandwidth limits and people want to make sure their images are only being used as they intend, this question will continue to come up. So, I started thinking about how Smugmug might help us with this issue some day and thought I'd brainstorm some ideas.

This is a question for the tech guys at Smugmug related to this topic. Do most browsers pass the referring page when they request an image from your web servers?

If so, it would sure be great if there was some way that you could log those referrers and let us see some recent amount of referrer history for any given image.

I recognize that this could be a lot of data if something is linked at a popular site, but I think there are ways around that. The point of the feature would be to find out which sites have external links so all that's really needed is for each image in your gallery to have a list of the referring web pages with a hit count indicating how many times this web page caused a hit on this image. The data could be limited to the last 100 web pages and cnts which would only be a few KB per image that had any external links. You could probably lump all the sizes together in one list since the owner can always just visit the web pages in question to find out which sizes they are linking to if need be.

ivar

SteveM wrote:

Hey guys,

I use Stat Counter, Google Analytics and Smugmug's stat feature to keep an eye on my site, areas of interest, etc. Smugmug is great in that it lists all the hits regardless of where they're from, but gives little information. My dilema is, I have some photos that have 30+ hits, while the others in the gallery are in the single digits, so I suspect these photos are being externally linked since I really can't find that much interest in them through Stat Counter (as with direct linking, no web page exists to place the Stat Counter/Analytics code on to track with). Is there any way to figure out where these are being linked from? And I know some of you really go wholeheartedly at protecting your copyrights, and find (miraculously) your photos being used elsewhere on the web. How do you do it? Most of my photos I donate the use of to noble clubs and schools, but I'd just like to make sure, and make sure proper credit is being given.

Thanks for reading,
Steve
www.downriverphotography.com
stevem01.smugmug.com

Hi Steve,

You could give www.wholinkstome.com a try, i've tried it a few times, and it seems to work just fine.

SteveM

ivar wrote:

Hi Steve,

You could give www.wholinkstome.com a try, i've tried it a few times, and it seems to work just fine.

Wow, that's pretty neat indeed. Thanks Ivar.

Steve
www.downriverphotography.com