How to download hotlink protected images? [closed]

Question

I want to download images from other websites that are hotlink protected. I don't want to link those images to my website. I just wanted to download them.

Mucus

With Java? Just do the normal url.openConnection dance. As long as you don't pass in a Referer header, you should get the image. – Gambier

(To clarify, most hotlink protection allows connections with no Referer at all, since they are optional in HTTP and may well not be present; they only block present Referer​s pointing to a third-party site. There are some blockers that require the first-party site to be present in the Referer (in which case you'd have to add it manually), but since this has many undesirable side-effects for the site it should be quite rare.) – Gambier

Can someone reopen the question so I can answer it? – Moseley

Answer 1

The usual hotlink-protection method checks if the "Referrer" HTTP Header matches the domain name of the original website.

You can easily bypass that by setting that header manually to point to a page in the website.

Geminian

Answer 2

You need to pass the referrer http header. You can do this with wget on most unix systems as follows:

wget --referer=http://www.google.com/ http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

Here a raw way to do it so you see exactly what is going on:

telnet google.com 80
GET /intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif HTTP/1.1
REFERER: http://www.google.com/
HOST: www.google.com

Dogfight

Answer 3

You can download hotlink protected images by using the following code:

URL url = new URL("http://www.somesite.com/picture.jpg");

URLConnection urlCon = url.openConnection();
urlConn.setRequestProperty("Referer", "http://www.somesite.com");
urlConn.connect();

InputStream urlStream = urlCon.getInputStream();

Image image = ImageIO.read(urlStream);

Geriatrics

Answer 4

The Postman extension for Chrome lets you make custom http requests. I found a hotlink-blocked image, copied it's url and entered it into Postman to GET it.

Elliott

I used the following Postman extension, put the image URL in and only works when hotlinking is not enabled. Are there kinds of hotlinking that disable this? chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman/… – Moseley