The Future of Forumshire

Eldorion wrote:

Norc wrote:or copy image address and so.

No, that's what hotlinking is. If you just paste the original image address and put it between [IMG] tags in your post, then it is still hosted on the server of whatever site you found it on. That means that whenever someone views the image on this forum, then the original site's servers still get pinged and have to send the information about the image over here. That costs the owner of the original server money in bandwidth even though his site isn't getting any traffic out of it. That's why I recommended re-uploading the image to a site like Photobucket, whose purpose is for people to host images they want to share elsewhere, or even to our own native image host here on the forum. That way we don't unfairly cost anyone else money.

oh, I didn't know. What if I upload directly to this site? Cause I don't know if I'm gonna bother making a photobucket thingi. I've noticed it's the same uploading service here as on my blog, the same shit the blog service uses.

If you upload directly to this site you're not costing anyone else anything because all the server stuff stays localized here. If you're looking for an easy image upload tool though, www.imgur.com doesn't require registration and is very clean and simple. I use it more than anything else these days, though I still sometimes go back to my old Photobucket account.

Imgur looks pretty neat, it's what I'd use if I ever wanted to upload pictures to the internet. I've only ever used Flickr, I used to put up holiday photos for my family up there but they really pissed me off when I didn't renew my pro as I couldn't really afford it, and then they only let me download the low resoulation version of your own photos

Eldorion wrote:If you upload directly to this site you're not costing anyone else anything because all the server stuff stays localized here. If you're looking for an easy image upload tool though, www.imgur.com doesn't require registration and is very clean and simple. I use it more than anything else these days, though I still sometimes go back to my old Photobucket account.

cool, then I'll just upload directly to here then (and get my computer filled up with crap xD)

You don't even have to do that. Most image hosts these days (including ours) give you the option of pasting in the URL of the image in question. The website then it will uploads a copy automatically. You don't have to save the image to your computer.

but that is what I normally do then, hotlinking! D: confused!

The difference is that hotlinking is where you paste the URL directly into the post in question, as such:

Code:

[IMG]http://www.someoneelsessite.com/images/image.jpg[/IMG]

What I was just talking about is where you go to a remote hosting site like Imgur or whatever and then you click the "upload from URL" button (or equivalent and then paste in the URL. The remote hosting site then uploads a NEW copy of the image to its own servers and gives you a new url on their server. So instead of using the URL to someoneelsessite.com, you can do this:

Code:

[IMG]http://www.imgur.com/image.jpg[/IMG]

It's the same image, but it's now being hosted on a different site, so it doesn't cost the original person bandwidth money. To do this via Imgur, just go to the home page and click the "web" button instead of the "computer" button. To do this via our native host, click the "url" button instead of the "File" button. After that, just follow the instructions on the screen. It's pretty simple.

Thanks, I'll try to remember that ^_^