Photos stored online

Good news! Thanks for updating.

Photobucket is a great service, they even allow hotlinking

veinglory said:

Photobucket is a great service, they even allow hotlinking

Click to expand...

Would you mind telling us what 'hotlinking' is?

You can use BB or html coding to have the picture appear at any site (like here) while they host it. This give a central place to put pictures which I can then have appear at my site, blog, forum posts or wherever without having to upload it to each of these places separately.

By hotlinking a photo that's being hosted on another site, you also use that other site's bandwidth when the picture is accessed.

The other bit of important information about hotlinking is that if you have photos or graphics on your own site, you'll want to disable hotlinking so that other people don't link directly to the pictures on your own site for their blogs or webpages and use up all of your bandwidth.

Thanks! Good info. to know.

You're welcome. Dh works as a sysadmin for a domain hosting company, and the problem came up with one of the customers who couldn't understand why she exceeded her available bandwidth on the 4th day of the month. It was because someone hotlinked to a small file (4 kb) and it was viewed something like over a million times. Sucks for her - she didn't want to fork over the cash for additional bandwidth to get her through the rest of the month.

In my case, I have around 1400 photos in my online photogallery, and if I allowed hotlinking... It could be a whole mess of problems.

The other thing to know about hotlinking is that, in my experience, when you add a new subdomain to your site, it messes up the hotlinking controls - I had problems viewing my own images on my own site with links that previously worked. To fix it, disable hotlinking and then re-enable and it works just fine again.

How do you go about disabling hotlinking?

Assuming we're talking about your own domain, you'll have to find out from your domain host what kind of access you have, whether it's CPanel or Plisk or one of the other ones.

If it's done through CPanel, then it's a matter of accessing your CPanel, usually through www.yourdomain.com/cpanel and then through a link through one of the 30 or 40 icons you have on that page and it's conveniently labelled Hotlinking.