I still don't see the reason to need to block it
That and IP blocks don't really work in this day and age where internet access is abundant and blocking single IP address is futile when the person your blocking has a dynamic IP address.
.htaccess works on apache WHEN enabled, which is not always the case. On IIS I dunno if it works at all since htaccess is an apache thing.
Yet again I don't see the issue with one person seeing some photos.