How can I prevent DownloadManager's from raping my galleries?
 

I have a bunch of galleries on my site, and there's no special coding or anything preventing someone with DownThemAll or even worse an image downloading program that crawls the site from running through my shit freely.
How do I fix this without hampering my normal users?

I guess I should state, I don't want to change my gallery script as I've spent way too much time customizing it and whatnot. So that means no switching to a Flash gallery or anything.
I don't mind someone saving one of my galleries for themselves, I just don't want someone using a program to crawl my site and take everything without even visiting.

bump in the night.

Not sure if it will work for your application, but I very highly recommend Throttlebox from BetterCGI (same people that make Strongbox). We've used it on one of our paysites for about a year now and I think it has actually improved retention because members can no longer slurp down the entire site in a couple of days.

It's customizable so you can allow x number of videos, x number of still images, and/or x amount of bandwidth, and it can be set so it's an amount of bandwidth per week, which it will then divide down to per day and per hour.

It's been a godsend for us, and it's pretty inexpensive ($150 or something)

If I was running a paysite, I could see this as being very useful and worth the money. I'm only running a small blog right now, and the content isn't owned by me so it's not really worth that much money to protect.

I personally wouldn't worry about it these days. Bandwidth is cheap.

Yes it is but problem is those downloaders can overload server with it.

You're both right, but it's not the fact of the bandwidth being used. I just don't want someone to copy all of my galleries and throw them on some free host and voila my whole picture area is copied.

there is no easy way to do what you want honestly if someone wants all your gals they will get them the best you can do is make it semi hard on them which wont do much its something i would not waste time on.

Not a bad list, but I guess I'll have to combine a few to get decent blockage.

If you've spent a lot of time / money on the script, and you're considering
spending a bunch more time to hack together some javascript that might
help a little bit, but certainly won't be fool proof, how much is that time worth?
Is it worth more than $150 it would cost to have a bullet proof, well tested
solution?