I dont want my image files to be available for direct download on my site?? Instead ppl should be directed...?

[Trigo]

...to an error page when they try to download that image??

Can this be done with htaccess
its not about stealing, I want the image to be displayed in a web page with advertisements instead of showing only image
like this http://l.yimg.com/a/i/identity2/profile_48c.png

[PoohBearPenguin]

Can't really be done.

While you can use javascript to disable the right-mouse menu, all this will do is make it slightly harder for them to save it. They can still use some sort of download utility or webpage scraper to grab all the files from your webpage. Or they can simply take a screenshot and get the image that way.

Remember, just viewing your webpage means that the person's computer has already downloaded a copy of your image file into their cache. It's not very hard to go into the cache directory and find files. I don't believe there's a webserver directive that tells web browsers not to store cached files on disk.

If you're worried about people stealing the image, use a low resolution version, and put a watermark in the file (Photoshop or other utilities can do this.)