I didn't say that it's hotlinking. I just said that if a website is bothered with the bandwidth, one of the ways to go about it is to ban the hotlinking. They will spend less.I'm working on my own website right now, and I know there may be the bandwidth issue of some sort. I will ban the hotlinking if it ever becomes a problem. And then, I think that making website and expect that no one will touch your pictures is not appropriate. If you display images, people will save them, save them and post elsewhere, hotlink them, etc... That's one thing every site owner should realize and especially if that's a big site (as I said in the topic's title 'tons of pictures', which implies it's some kind of a big commercial site, not someone's personal page).