Dont open images in browser force download if navigated directly on image

Question

Is there a setting for apache or .htaccess to not open images in browser, but instead force the user to download them to their computer to open e.g. when he navigates to http://site.com/image.jpg this will make him download the file. The only time I want images loaded in the browser is when they're embedded in a HTML page. e.g. http://site.com/mypage.html

If it is not possible then can we at least just block it completely if they go to http://site.com/image.jpg, they will get error 403 or something for any file other than html and php?

Answer 1

There would be a bit of a performance overhead, but you could make a page (php or whatever language) that all it does it pull up images from a directory that otherwise isn't web accessable. You could then make all image links go to that page and make them still look like image urls using rewrites.

Page: /images/25.jpg => /images.php?id=25&type=jpg or something similar

Note sure exactly what you are trying but might want to read this:

http://michael.theirwinfamily.net/articles/csshtml/protecting-images-using-php-and-htaccess