[geeklog-devel] Hiding the image source path

[Simon Lord]

I have been looking for a solution to a minor problem.  Basically I 
want to prevent people from linking directly to images on my site, OR 
WORSE, following the paths in the html source to find other images etc.

After some researching, I found the following solution (see SOLUTION) 
which I find very clever.  The idea is that instead of rendering our 
pages with:

<img src="http://www.geeklog.net/images/geeklog-logo.gif" width="120" 
height="12" border="0">

Which simply invites people to explore the images folder (unless you 
know the exact image name on my server you won't find squat, but many 
don't have this feature). The other problem is that some paths have 
very revealing links.  Image a path such as:

<img src="http://www.geeklog.net/hidden-porn/beach/sandy.gif.....

Well well, users can start editing the link down and try to view each 
directory to see what's there.

SOLUTION:

The solution is to run the image paths through a common php file 
(lib-common is ideal).  The image code would look something like this:

<img src="images.php?try-to-find-me.gif">

The code in the php file can prevent people from using the query from 
pages residing off the server.  So we have a win win situation whereby 
the viewer cannot see the path to the image and they can't copy the 
link to a page on their server as well.

The code to do all this is here:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Web_Languages/PHP/Q_20403645.html

I'm sure it can be adapted for web page links as well.  And as you all 
know, I can barely scribe my name properly much less code PHP 
skillfully.  I'm hoping someone with little time on their hands can 
find a clever way to get this working in Geeklog.

Thanks.

Sincerely,
Simon