[Solved] How to Protect Uploads, if User is not Logged In?

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Only checking if the cookie exists, is not much of a strict protection.

To get a stronger protection, you can pass or “proxy” all requests to the uploaded folder (exemplary uploads in the following example) through a php script:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads/(.*)$ dl-file.php?file=$1 [QSA,L]

All requests to uploaded files (which includes images in posts) would go to dl-file.php which then can do verify if the user is logged in or not.

If the user is not logged in, your sites login-form will be shown. After the user logged in, she will get redirected back to the file and can download it now.

Exemplary dl-file.php.

Something similar can be found in \wp-includes\ms-files.php in your wordpress installation, but that one is for multisite and w/o the login check and redirects.

Depending on how much traffic you have, it could be wise to better integrate this with your server, e.g. X-Accel-Redirect or X-Sendfile headers.

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solved How to Protect Uploads, if User is not Logged In?