I am building a realty website for a client whereby I will be getting all of my data from the RETS server. There is roughly 5,000+ properties in the DB so I pull the images for each property on the fly (as to not overload my server).
Everything is working properly, but I only pull the images when a user views the certain property. So my question is: will a search bot also trigger this image download??
If so, how can I prevent that??
Depends on the search bot. If your images are all served from some known and well-formed URL, then you can tell bots to not hit them by adding a disallow line to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/