Tracie

I've noticed that more and more people are direct linking to pictures instead of hosting on either their own site or a free image hosting site. By direct linking, you're stealing bandwidth from the site owner.

For some of you, that may not mean anything, but for those of us who have our own sites, we know exactly how much it can hurt us. For example, a couple of years ago, it caused my site to be shut down for over half the month, for mulitple months in a row, due to overage of bandwidth. With all those free imaging hosting services, I don't see why people still feel the need to direct link.

Hotlinking means linking a pictures directly from a site.

Here are some alternatives for you to host your pictures on that allow direct/hot linking:

Photobucket
Imageshack
Tiny Pic
Flickr
Picture Trail

Spider01

Thanks Tracie for those links.
I've used Yahoo photo and MSN group sites, but there are very limiting to the size of their free sites.
I have not try your links yet (But I will), are their limits to those sites? Which one would your recomend as the best in your opinion?

Tracie

The one I use most often is ImageShack.

It's free, you don't have to sign up for it (if you don't want to) and if images are too large, it automatically makes thumbnails that you can post.

The second one I use most is Photobucket. It's still free, but you have to sign up for an account (which is free also). The good thing about that is that you can make abums and store your pictures too. It's more permanent than Imageshack. The only down side is that there are more limits to file sizes and they don't have those handy thumbnails pregenerated for you.

But really any of those image site work well, it's all a matter of preference I guess.

Diamon

For all firefox users (if you aren't one, you should be) there is a firefox extension that allows you to simply right click on an image on any website and it will upload it to imageshack for you and provide you with the URL to the imageshack hosted version of the picture.

*Dawn*

I did not know that existed. That's awesome. Thank you for posting that, it makes things a lot easier. And faster.

Also, thank you for posting this thread, Tracie. A lot of hotlinked pictures won't show up for me (I have rather slow internet) and for some reason they show up better when people upload them to say, Imageshack.

Dyegov

I always use ImageShack, I love their service, it's amazing, and I use Firefox, but I didn't know abput that extension, thanks a lot Diamon

lozboz87

wow, i so didnt know that direct linking steals bandwith.... i recommend photobucket, its so easy

Hollee Ann

oh geez THANK YOU!

i had my photobucket down for nearly a month because of people hotlinking. i suggest using photobucket or tinypic.

scenceable

I use greatestjournal photo hosting, because its free, you can delete pics after you link them (and the link doesn't break, like photobucket) and it lets you hold 1000 350k pics. it's awesome.

Clayton

yes it sucks when people direct link to your site
I always use those free image sites. I use photobucket and imageshack. But I'll give the other ones a try also