I know I can do this outside of MT, but is there anyway to protect my photos WITHIN MT? Maybe a hack or plug in that I could use? I'm having a heck of a time with other people linking to my images straight off my website, not to mention the possibility of having to pay for extra bandwidth for some of these linkers ARGH!

MT is a content management system, not a system or server management system. So, no.

Nope, you can't have MT do this for you. This is something that you need to handle at the web-server level. Here's an article that describes how to use .htaccess to prevent hotlinking.
http://www.vnwr.com/resources/tutorials/htaccess.html

what OS is your server running?

Would it be possible to edit your .htaccess via MT?

Yes, but it would most definitely not work because of the security measures taken by your provider...

I'm not a big security expert, so I'm not sure if this is helpful or not!

You might be able to edit the htaccess through MT, if you are running suexec or another security program like that on your server... then .htaccess file wouldn't have to be chmoded any differently than normal. You would probably also have to add the SafeMode value into your mt.cfg (see the Config Settings for more details.)

Kristine

Well, you could also do it with php, CF, whatever, but outside of running the webserver under your GUID, the provider should have fwrite or cffile enabled.

Easy thing to try, though. Just write a simple script in the language of your choice. If it works, you're there.

FWIW, I'm not a big security expert either.

FYI on Dreamhost -- which is fairly security consious -- I have no trouble at all editting my .htaccess file as an index template. at the moment it's just so I can edit it from here (library) where I don't have an ftp client, but it could be edited to contain tags say to process a redirect. 2 notes -- the file already existed before I started editing it thru MT, and the DH servers use a rather nice suexec variant.

with a newborn i just lack time to put the 300 some-odd pictures into a new area within a script to prevent hotlinking, which is why i asked if there were any plug-ins, as i use a photolog. turns out that blogomania has hotlink protection, so i'm giving that a try for now. hopefully the baby will let me put him down long enough to find something soon