Hotlinking is the action taken by a person linking directly to a picture(or audio or video) found on a random website, for use in a forum or pages of their own. yes, this is a lot like straight linking, only to a picture, and it takes up a bit more of that precious bandwidth.. which in the grand scheme of the internet, is actually quite a big number to start with.
This is where it gets sticky. This days people, especially hosts, are concerned about the amount of bandwidth that is being used. Usually they make the folk paying for space use, pay for it as a part of their monthly fee. in other words, if a single picture gets linked to and appears on a thousand different forums.. it can get fairly pricy for the original host of the picture. In defense, people have gotten to saying "No hotlinking directly to pictures" on their pages of pictures. and if you do it anyway, you are stealing their bandwidth, which is a no-no. (theres also the danger of the host changing the picture you are linking to... could make for a nasty surprise eh?)
On the other hand, there are places that allow for the linking of pictures.. within limits, of course... since everyone has them. Places like photobucket, and bunches of avatar hosts, who will give you the direct link to their pictures for use in forums and the like. Now, if your link somehow exceeds their limit, they may shut down the picture temporarily until the usage rate is back within the limit.
So, consider this..
If you have a web site, with pictures being hosted on it, and you link to one of those pictures for use in a forum, you are still hotlinking... but not really stealing, because its your own site.
If you see a picture on someone elses site, and they tell you no, your hotlinking to it is stealing their bandwidth.
If you see a picture on someone else's site, and they say its ok, your hotlinking to it is still hotlinking, but with the owners permission. so its not really stealing, because you have the permission to link.
All in all, if you don't want to "host" all those pictures yourself.. ask them to make up their own photobucket account and hotlink to them, themselves. Its not that hard to do.
definition example 1 from free-hosts.
Definition 2 from wiki
Definition 3 from the urban dictionary.
help info on YouTube for embedding vids on other sites.
Photobucket's definition (which allows 25GB a month in bandwidth usage, btw.)
2 comments:
I don't like hotlinking because it uses others bandwidth. And I would be so upset to see my bandwidth blown sky high from people direct linking to my images. I expect others would feel the same, not to mention it's their photobucket account they can delete that image whenever they want, or they could delete it and make a new image with the same URL that is different. Something like: You F**king B**ch stop hotlinking to my images. I've seen it plenty of times, infact when I first started learning to code it happened to me because I didn't know any better. I'm sorry but I'll never direct link/hotlink to other people's images because it's not yours, and they can alter the image how ever they like. Most everyone who knows what hotlinking is hates it when people hotlink, because it eats your bandwidth like no tomorrow.
Oh yes, I do agree with you and I have seen the same thing happen. Which is why I said, hotlinking without permission is still a bad deal.
Photobucket suggests that if you see an image you like, that you copy it into your own album before linking to it. That way you do not have the issues you mentioned, come about. In fact, they have a "copy to my album" button just for that purpose under the images you can see there.
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