prevent public access to media links

If I understand correctly, do you want to secure the upload directory against unauthorized access? Bad idea. Without the directory, your website has no images, no graphics, no videos, no download files… whatever you include in your website.

Of course, bots also access these files – which is also important so that your PDF files can be found in search engines, for example. If you want to exclude bots from indexing the files in the upload directory, you can control this via robots.txt. An SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math can help with this, but you can also enter the information manually.

And what kind of private files are you talking about? The upload directory is not intended for private files. Whatever is there is also accessible. If you want to store files on your web that are not publicly accessible, there are plugins like https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/prevent-direct-access/ that store the files you define as such in a separate and protected directory take off.

Dear @threadi, you misunderstood or I didn’t explain well.

Private files is meant for complicated pictures, internal structure, complex scripts that took weeks to make and we shouldn’t be happy to share … sorry but it is not true that if we prevent external usage of internal files the website doesn’t work!

All the internal structure works well as it must be, but simply redirect to 404 all attempts to access from external to wp-content/uploads/…

Of course, with a simple inspection tool they can still have access, but we don’t want to make life easy for those who simply want to copy and paste our jobs.

You can protect such files with the plugin mentioned above. Then only those who are logged into the backend have access to them.

Alternatively, there is only the option of not uploading the files in question to WordPress in the first place. Instead, you can store them in a separate directory, which you can protect with the means available in your hosting.

Yes thx,

I was thinking to store the files in a different url. But I just wanted to try some examples which are on the web, working on .htaccess or on functions.php:

https://formidableforms.com/protect-wordpress-media-files/
https://www.download-monitor.com/wordpress-restrict-access-to-media-files/
https://www.noupe.com/wordpress/how-to-protect-wordpress-files-and-uploads-folder.html
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-restrict-media-library-access-to-users-own-uploads-in-wordpress/
https://www.greengeeks.com/tutorials/protect-media-library-wordpress-users-uploads/

https://preventdirectaccess.com/restrict-wordpress-media-library-permissions/
https://locall.host/wordpress-prevent-direct-access-to-media-files/

but for no one works

thank you

and if I change the folders permission via ftp? public: not read , yes execute