I am doing the same. Fortunately, the websites requiring the referer to be set are getting fewer and fewer – some years ago, I regularly got placeholder images ‘THIS IMAGE WAS STOLEN FROM XYZ’ when browsing XYZ without referers.
I host a small, very low traffic website. One day, the bandwidth shoots through the roof and stays high. The reason? One of the images on a page got added to the .sig of someone in a popular forum. Suddenly thousands of people are fetching the image.
The solution was to filter by referrer header, letting the image be seen by visitors to the actual page, but linking from other sites gets blocked. Note that usually it's best to allow requests that have no referrer header at all, otherwise you'll be blocking some legitimate viewers of your site.
End result: bandwidth back down to the usual, tiny levels. It's not that I cared about people copying the images, I just didn't want to foot the bill for the traffic!
I think you misunderstand — this seems to have been claudius' point:
> Note that usually it's best to allow requests that have no referrer header at all, otherwise you'll be blocking some legitimate viewers of your site.
It was probably a badly-placed reply; my point was to illustrate a use for referrer headers and to state that sites blocking based on the lack of a referrer were doing it wrong.
