This has to do with pictures that belong to other people and websites where people are paying for the bandwidth that they use. Like cell-phone minutes, sort of.

If, for example, you go to my website and see an orchid picture you want to use on your website. There are two things you can do. First option is to simply copy it to your website. If you don't have permission, that is simple theft of intellectual property but is not an actual out-of-pocket expense for me.

Second, you can put the full URL of the picture in you web page. That is not only theft of the picture, but doing it costs me money, because every time it is loaded by anybody in the world, it uses my bandwidth. Insult to injury, so to speak.

FYI, on Snapfish using Firefox, if you put the cursor over the picture, right mouse click and select "Copy image location" you will get the full URL. Paste that in the browser and you will see the picture. Snapfish probably wants people to see the photos on their page not included in other web pages. I see their point since they are selling a service. It may be your picture, but it is their bandwidth.

BTW, I am incredibly easy with giving permission for my pictures if they are copied and I am given credit as photographer. Ask, tho, non-commercial purposes only especially not eBay. ;->

Back to posting pictures. If you have your own pictures on your own website, then add links all you want. Use a photo editor to reduce the size. I do many of my pictures 432px (6 inches) wide with a quality level of 4 (the low end of medium).

Hi - I use Flickr which seems to allow what is known as 'hot-linking' which simply means taking a photo or file that is stored somewhere (ie flickr) and posting it on another site (ie gardenweb). As Richard explained, think of all websites (including photo-hosting websites like flickr or snapfish) as having little toll-gates. Every time some sort of traffic or data passes through from their computer onto the internet, they have to pay a little bit. So, for instance, every time someone opens up a post here on garden web and sees a photo that is actually hosted on flickr, a little bit of data is traveling from the flickr computers in california online and through the web.

Stopping hot-linking is partly, as richard said, because they probably only want this data seen on their own site. It's also partly because if they let it happen, the link to the photo could start appearing everywhere on the internet, and every time anyone opens that page, a little bit of bandwidth would be sucked away...they would basically be drained dry!

Richardol and Calvin,

Thank you for your help with this one. Richardol, I just downloaded Firefox and now I can see the correct address and surprisingly it doesn't look a lot like what you see in the URL.

{{gwi:174802}}