Google Photos Screensaver 2.0
Posted on 11 April 2008
Check your web server logs. The Google Photos Screensaver 2.0 web bot does not respect robots.txt rules. It tripped over my tarpit a few days ago and I just noticed it hitting the same url again this morning. It’s banned now.
The strange thing is, I saw two requests from this user agent a few minutes ago. One from 66.249.85.129 which is a Gooogle IP, and another from 117.193.129.58 which looks like an Indian IP.
Which one tripped over my tarpit? The Google IP address, 66.249.85.129 did.
If you want to ban “Google Photos Screensaver 2.0″, add these lines to the .htaccess in your root directory (presuming you have mod_rewrite enabled of course!)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Google\ Photos\ Screensaver\ 2.0.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
I also ban a number of other user agents. This could could be merged into a few less lines but this makes it easy to add new lines quickly:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Microsoft\ URL\ Control.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} WebAlta\ Crawler/2\.0.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*larbin.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Python-urllib.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww-perl.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Indy\ Library.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Jakarta\ Commons-HttpClient.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
3 responses to Google Photos Screensaver 2.0
Thanks, never knew it existed before now
I would think if you have pictures up on the internet for people to see, you’d WANT something like google to display your pictures to everyone it can. Hopefully your pictures have a blurb or link, such as “inphotos.org” so that people will come to your site to see more of your work.
But, at least, if for some reason you DON’T want people viewing your site, you can turn off Google’s robots.
Walt D in LV
I think Google Screensaver is more like an rss reader. It just displays photos from rss feeds that people manually enter. Since it’s not actually a web crawler, it shouldn’t respect robots.txt, right?