How to download hotlink protected images?

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.

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.

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