Counting Downloads

[Anon]

Is there a way for a PHP to watch and track the number of downloads of a certain file? I know of counters that work by counting the number of times an image is downloaded.
Say I have a file on my site. Other websites not owned by me link directly to this file. So they download it with a simple a href... So I cant use a download page to count it or something... Is there a way I can count how many times an image is downloaded? Im really not sure if this makes sense, or even remotely how to do it. I just want to be able to count the download requests without opening up a separate page/browser to do it... Any Ideas?

-Drew

[knickerlas]

Hi
not sure I'm clear on this but if you just want to see how many times someone sees your picture then use a simple counter script writing to a text file or DB.

Nick

[brandonschnell]

hide the location of the downloadable files. then make users request the file like:
www.yoursite.com/download.php?filename=image.jpg

in the download.php script set the header to the appropriate file, readfile() the real file, and increment something in the mysql database that logs the downloads. something like: UPDATE download_logs SET downloads = downloads + 1 WHERE filename = "image.jpg".

if the files are in the web root then the users can't download without requesting the file using the download.php page. personally i'd use id numbers and not filenames to avoid users requesting download.php?filename=/etc/passwd or something and store the actual filenames in the mysql database.