Hotlinking & Photobucket and the bigger picture...

[N52]

Hi guys

My father got delivery of his new car yesterday.It looks amazing.



No brake dust......Yet








Maybe here you can see.The only problem is the wax that the manufacturer applies on the new car.I think its not completely off yet.Is that good or doesnt matter and it will go off after some time.



Just wanted to share my happiness and ask my maybe stupid question

[Ryan L.]

Pictures don't work for me...

Try photobucket

[N52]

does that work?Let me know so that i ll post the rest

[Mike Phillips]

It's called Hotlinking and technically it's stealing bandwidth. There's a price for everything in life, or another way of saying this is,

There's no free ride

Hosting a picture on website and then sharing it on another website enables the people on the other website to see the picture but the website or hosting company that is actually the place where the picture is located pays for the bandwidth every time the picture/thread is clicked on.

It's called hotlinking or depending upon the hosting company's point of view bandwidth theft. Think of bandwidth as water or electricity flowing through a cable or a pipe, there's a cost of using up the resource and in the case of a picture it's data being sent over the Internet.

Depending upon how large a site is and how popular it is, hotlinking can cost a lot of money, so some hosing company's don't allow it and instead a non-picture picture shows up in it's place like you see above sending you to the hosting company's website. The idea being if you want to see the picture that's okay but you have to go to the hosting company's site to see it and anything else on the site like content and banner adds, i.e. marketing materials which of course any business that wants to stay in business needs you to buy their goods and services so they can in-turn make a profit and thus stay in business.

Thus some company's prohibit hotlinking.

A better solution is to watermark the photo so wherever it's posted the watermark tells the viewer where the photos is hosted and the viewer is interested in the site, or specifically the content on the site they can then figure out how to get there from the watermark which can be made to read as URL address.

Meguiar's Online offers our members space in our own online gallery and once uploaded you can share them all over the Internet at least at this time, we will likely be placing a watermark over the images in the future as we are in the business of staying in business and while it's nice to be nice,

There's no free ride

[MaximusZTS]

I can now see the pics.

does that work?Let me know so that i ll post the rest

[N52]

I used the ''insert image'' button and then entered the url in my first post.Second one is IMG tags from photobucket

[N52]

I can now see the pics.

ok here they are

[Mike Phillips]

does that work?Let me know so that i ll post the rest

Now what N52 has done has posted the URL address to the photo where it's been uploaded to PhotoBucket, but as time goes by and whoever has the above picture in their account at Photobucket gets tired of the picture or uses up their alloted room, they'll delete this photo to make room for new photos and we'll end up with Red X's on our site in our threads.

Kind of takes the fun out of a thread when someone describes something but instead of a picture you see a red x. This is why we wrote this article,

Why PhotoBucket is a waste of time...


The big picture is the big picture and that's Meguiar's Online is in this for the long run and for this reason we want the pictures in our threads to endure, thus one of the reasons we have our own gallery. We've been around for over 100 years and plan on being here, including on this forum, for another 100 years.

We can't stop people from posting pictures hosted on other sites and we don't want to, but I think we all know what the eventual result is going to be...

Return of the Red X's!

[N52]

Mr Mike i am sorry.I didnt understand the from the first post.

I will delete all my other posts, upload my pics in the gallery and then post them here.
Again sorry

[Mike Phillips]

Here's the URL to the photo location on e60.net


http://forums.e60.net/uploads/post-4960-1163452091.jpg

If you click on the above link it will take you to a webpage with an image here,



Note the word hotlink at the end of the URL address


Not picking on you N52, and didn't mean to take this thread off topic, but mostly trying to share a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes in the online forum world with images.