In my opinion the only way you can prevent site rips causing bandwidth problems for this sort of content is to have either thumbnail or very highly compressed images, perhaps watermarked as well and then hack up some PHP to do a download cart style system with a login and quotas.
If the browser is going to display the image then by definition there will be a way to rip it, so the best you can do is make the image viewed in the browser either so small it doesn't matter or undesirable due to aggressive compression and/or watermarking.
It might be worth looking at one of the CMS systems (Joomla/Mambo or others) with one of the photo library plugins or one of the dedicated PHP photo libraries (which may be a better choice if you never need the other CMS functions)
As for hosting I am a bit confused as to how he has sufficient space and bandwidth to put the images somewhere and yet not have capacity for the pages ?