I've been seeing a lot of requests for images hosted on my server from other websites.

Rather than allow this to carry on, I'm considering using mod\_rewrite and .htaccess to prevent this using something like

```
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ - [F]

```

I'm sure I read somewhere that there may be some kind of undesirable side-effects or "gotchas" that can catch you out, but can't find the source or anything about it. Most sites only give you the code snippet rather than discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.

Are there any such undesirable side-effects or "gotchas" that I should be aware of if I choose to put this on my server?