Tech Tuesday: Posting Images and Hotlinking

This week's post is a response to a question from a reader. Sarah of Mombalance asks:

Would you consider doing a Tech Tuesday about embedding photos in posts? I know how to add a photo from my computer onto blogger, but I would love to add pics from amazon (with things I like) and I have no idea how to use photobucket. I'm also not really sure where to find pictures that it's okay to use unless I take them.

Why sure, Sarah, I can talk about that. When it comes to blog posts, I confess that I love seeing images and photos embedded in a post. It breaks up the text and gives some life to your writing. While it's unethical to steal images, such as personal photos or artwork, I will confess that I've copied images from company sites in order to write reviews on their products. I tend to right click on the image, select "Save Image As" and save it to my computer.
This of course takes up space on your hard drive. When I want to add the image to my blog post, I just get it from my computer and add it.

You can upload images to an online photo-sharing site like Flickr, Photobucket, etc, but that adds another step to posting images on your blog, since you need to get the direct URL links to the photos. Plus some of these sites are free to a point, and often charge you when you go over their limit. I know Blogger has a limit (as you can see in the red box in the image below), but I have yet to reach it and find out what happens.

I know some people just take the direct link to an image from a website and ink it directly to their blogs by putting the URL address of the image in the spot below, circled in red.
This is called hotlinking, and it's a no-no, especially if you haven't gotten permission from the site. There's debate on whether it's illegal or not, but what you are doing when you take the image is not just stealing content, but stealing bandwidth (which many sites pay for) from the website, and using that site's resources. This can slow down their website, and your hotlinks can be traced too, which can lead to a spanking (just checking to see if you're paying attention).

In an ideal world, we'd be using our own images for posts, but sometimes one does need to borrow from other sites. In these cases, I'd recommend asking permission and then posting a small credit below or next to the image.