[SeafoodGumbo]

Isn't that hotlinking?

I thought we were always supposed to save photos to our hard drive, and then upload them to a free photo hosting site like shutterfly or flickr.

[Spunky]

"I thought we were always supposed to save photos to our hard drive....

I never do. I just go to whatever site and copy the properties. If you want the picture to stay around for a long time it is probably best to do it your way. Otherwise they disappear.

[ThePythonicCow]

Isn't that hotlinking?

Well, -all- image posting has to have a URL pointing to some server on the world-wide-web that is hosting that image. One can do one of:

• Hot link to the original site using that image, which is the easiest way, but fails if that original image is no longer available from that site
• Copy the image over to a free photo hosting site, as you suggest, which then depends on that free site continuing to display it. Free sites that don't have some way to make money tend to vanish, or at least, tend to quit serving up such images for free hot links from other sites.
• Provide your own web site, and host the image there, which lasts as long as you pay the monthly bill for your own web site.
• Use the limited web space provided by your ISP (for some ISP's) for hosting the images, which lasts until you change to a different ISP.
• Probably other choices for web servers that I haven't thought of here.

For quickie posts, I hot link, being lazy. This avoids having to copy the image to some other web server.

For posting of some critical image that I don't want to go away for a long time, say if I had conclusive proof that a letter "proving" that George W. Bush had skipped out of National Guard duty was really a forgery on a modern day word processor, I'd upload that image to the most reliable web server I could afford (and keep backup copies of that image in multiple, off-site, secure, locations.)