thanks for the ideas guys. For now I'm just doing this: There is an asp page that gets an image id from the query string. I just write the image back using Response.WriteFile()... I don't know if this is the correct way but it seems to be working. Now I just need to check the refferal url and make sure they are not coming from another website. If the refferal url is from some other website then it wouldnt show the image. works fine with me
I think I'm ok with the users saving the images to their harddrive. I was mainly concerned about linking to my webserver (for some top-secret reason )

hmm now how would I go about checking the refferal url?