Earlier today I got an email back from the web host where the site resided that was linking to pictures of Alex (“Site A”). They have blocked all access to this site until the author removes the hyperlinks. One of the other parents involved also emailed me to let me know that she had received a similar email.
Even though I had removed the picture of Alex the site was linking to, it would still attempt to retrieve the photo from our web site every time someone visited the page. According to the sunpig server logs, the last time someone tried to access the image was at about 12:40 this afternoon.
The logs show that the page was put up on Saturday 25th January. It got accessed 10 times before Sunday evening, which is when I took Alex’s photo down. Since then, it has been hit 91 times, from 38 distinct IP addresses. (Two of those hits, and one of those IP addresses is mine, while I was checking up on the state of the site.)
So I’m relieved, but only a little. I can take action when someone links to my image, but if they had taken copies and put them on their own site, I would never have found out about them. Is there anything else out there? I may never know. I’m going to try not to let it bother me too much.