OK, one for Ernie

I have accounts with photobucket.com, imgur.com and dropbox.com

I put my personal pictures on Photobucket aranged into albums etc. which is all very nice, but the site has become rather slow and cluttered.

imgur is much more simple and streamlined in my opinion, but I only use it for quickly hosting "junk" pictures to save hot-linking. Hot-linking is bad, as a wise egg once nodded.

Dropbox I use exclusively for backups, but it can be used for image hosting.

What do other people use? What's easiest on a netbook with a slow internet connection?

flickr?

edit: nvm

tried http://www.imagebam.com/ ? its good for multiple photo uploading

What's hot-linking and why is it bad?

It's linking to the specific image file, rather than the host site's page that the image is presented on. If you do that it has two major consequences - if the host site changes the URL (say if they upgrade their back end DB or something) then the link breaks and secondly, if the site uses in page ads to make it's money, they obviously don't get any views on those ads.

It's one of those 'implicit contract' things really - you get free image hosting, the company gets to make some money from the ads shown to the people who view your image. If you hot-link, you're kind of cheating the company out of their part of the bargain.

The image hosting site I use (www.skitch.com) doesn't mind hot-linking, in fact they provide you with a direct image URL if you want it. However they survive (so far) by offering added services to their users for a little extra fee (£14 a year) which I have no problem paying frankly.


Jon

The main reason people object to hot-linking is that it uses their bandwidth. Some people pay for bandwidth, say 50p/GB, so you are actually stealing cash from their pocket. Other people use free hosting which usually has a relatively small bandwidth allowance. Once it's used up, instead of an image you get a "bandwidth allowance exceeded" warning notice displayed. Basically, you f*ck up their website.

Hot-linking to sites like the BBC or the other big news sites is not really a problem because x404 views will be trivial to them, but hot-linking to small sites and personal blogs is basically just theft. The victim also knows which websites are stealing their bandwidth, which could get x404 in some trouble.

Rather than hot-linking directly to an image, you should upload a copy to a hosting site which you have permission to use. That could be your personal web space or an image host such as Flickr.

The basic Flickr accounts limit bandwidth, only the Pro accounts have unlimited bandwidth, so if linking to Flickr it's best to check if it's a basic account or not.

Mark

Provided it's your own Flickr account and not someone else's then that's a personal choice to risk. I don't think the views on x404 would kill a basic Flickr account, unless a load of scumbags on other forums and blogs started to hot-link to it

It's a very good example of you need to be considerate though. Having your Flickr account rendered useless for weeks could really hurt someone.

Ahh, right. All my A HREFs are hotlinks then, because I have my own webspace and everything (including my avatar) is there. Never caused me a problem, but I pay for it and there's no ads involved.

I rarely hot-link and if I do, it's usually because I'm mobile and it takes ages to save the image, upload it to your PB account, find the link and then post it. Very time-consuming especially if you're using anything less than 3G.

I find PB enough for my needs but I agree with the cluttering. At one stage, it used to be really good. Now it's becoming more of a faff to do anything!

IMGUR has a very nice 'Fox extension, a right-click essentially does all the work for you

Ooh, *gets*

That's pretty cool, even does screen sniping!

whats screen sniping?




?

You can grab any rectangular section of your screen to upload by just dragging, rather than taking a screen-shot and editing it in something else first.

Or you could use a real OS (8-p)