There are really only two ways to go about hotlinking prevention; the brute force way or the complex way.

The brute force way doesn’t always work and might affect your users’ ability to enjoy your site.

The complex way alleviates user issues but takes a little bit of time to implement.

Picking which way is right for you isn’t as simple as deciding between one of the two methods. It depends upon the way your web site is built and both methods require some degree of testing once they’re implemented.