Options to set font size, text position and reduce opacity of overlay

Hi!

Yes, we are working on this bit for the next version + the option to set text color. The current version was hurried through production as a lot of people were requesting the plugin after Google updated their image Search function.

If you like the plugin we would greatly appreciate if you have time to post a star rating on http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/imaguard and also add a “working” vote for your WP version.

I presume you are successfully “hacking” the Imaguard plugin to work the way you need it pending the next version. But if you get stuck or have any questions, just let us know.

Redirecting to the post where the image was used creates some program logic challenges since an image can be used on many posts. But if you don’t mind redirecting to the first post where it was used, you can hack Imaguard with something like this, I guess. Just replace the whole ir_createpage() function in imaguard/index.php with two new functions:

function ir_getpostidbyurl($url) {
	global $wpdb;
	$query = "SELECT ID FROM {$wpdb->posts} WHERE post_content like '%".$url."%' LIMIT 1";
	$thisid = $wpdb->get_var($query);
	return $thisid;
}

function ir_createpage()
{
	$post = new stdClass;

	$ir_location = "http://yoursite.com/index.php?p=".ir_getpostidbyurl($_GET['img']);
	Header( "HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily" );
	Header( "Location: $ir_location" );
	exit;
}

(replace the yoursite.com bit of course).

I haven’t tested it, but it should work (let me know either way, if you try it out).

However, this is pretty dirty. The query may slow down large sites and it does a 2nd redirect.

We will try to implement something in an upcoming version. Maybe not the v 1.2.2 which we are planning for tomorrow, but pretty soon.

Hope this helped a bit.

Thank you for the kind words! Glad the hack works – hopefully we will come up with something less crude for a later version.

When using the non-aggressive redirect functionality in Imaguard, hotlinking from non white listed sites won’t work. The reason is that the image actually renders a html page, not an image file. Thus it will show blank if hotlinked as an image.

Your image should still work in Google Image Search, though, since Googlebot-images stores a thumbnail on their server when crawling. The google image bot will normally use local referrers when crawling images, so it will see your images when crawling your site. You should still add all googlebot versions to your whitelist, though. The thumnail in the search will work normally – and the google image preview (the larger preview that was implemented recently) will show blurred. This is because Google uses javascript to first enlarge the thumbnail and then replaces it with the actual hotlinked image when that has loaded (you can see this if you try to click on some thumbnails not cached in your browser – it will be blurred for a short while and them become clear). Since the hotlinked image never loads, it will stay blurred, which is normally good as it encourages users to either click on “see original” or the actual picture. The latter leads to your blog post and the former hopefully redirects to the same.

Thank you for your post. We are planning a stand alone plugin that will skip the whole redirect system and generate the actual image file on the fly (so instead of show-image.php?img=img.jpg you simply load img.jpg directly and a handler will generate the correct version based on the referrer and user agent. Because of the rather complicated file structure WP uses for uploads, such a plugin will require a rather intrusive use of htaccess files in a number of subfolders. Therefore we are not planning to make it part of the standard Imaguard which is a “gentler” plugin 🙂

In any case the problem will always remain; how do you distinguish between hotlinking and direct access? Neither user agent nor referrer can be trusted to give such information. The only way we have come up with is encoded timestamping of images (image.jpg?timestamp=AGHFHS). Anyone accessing an image with an out of date timestamp is probably accessing it through a hotlink outside your control.

Anyway, thanks for sharing the code!