Okay guys, I've seen this happening often (and was guilty of it once or twice).

If you find a good picture on the Internet that you want to use, please do not hotlink it from the original website. You're stealing that site owner's bandwidth and that practice is known bandwidth theft.

Take a few minutes to save the pictures onto your computer and upload to a free image hosting site such as Photobucket, or Tinypic. Then, you can hotlink from the image host. Photobucket allows hotlinking, and you get 1500 Mb of bandwidth a month. It takes a bit of time to re-upload, but it's common courtesy to use your own image hosting service you registered for instead of stealing the bandwidth someone else paid for.

~fairy

(I couldn't think up a more general forum for this, so if you feel it's more appropriate in a different forum, please send a mod report)

Good post! I used to do that, but not on ddn on another site. I use photo bucket now.

I even noticed a post on ddn the otherday that showed someone how to do it from another site.

A good reminder.
thanks
Sarah xXx

yes, it´s very annoying if bandwith is stolen. I pay for my own webspace and I wouldn´t like that.

I use photobucket or my own webspace for hotlinking.

Kathy

Photobucket is good, but also ImageShack lets you upload images and even gives you the links you need to cut and paste.

ImageShack is good when you're in a hurry, and dont' necessarily want to keep all your photos in one album.

I would add though, when copying images like this you need to be aware if they are copyrighted or not!

hiya

wowee!
great poost im glad i read this because i wouldn`t have known
lol

thanks for letting us all know!
karma for you
lv lols xxx

hah. HEY SIS!! okay...yeah...i've seriously got to watch myself when i want to post pictures from the internet. i have a bit of a tendancy to do that.
thanks for reminding me of that!

Ummmm.....

This sticky is very wrong.
Hotlinking to a picture may increase someone's bandwidth. But it also increases their traffic. If a site has posted a picture it is usually because they WANT people to look at it or see their site.

But more importantly is that downloading pictures without permission from most sites is ILLEGAL. It is the same thing as downloading music or movies without paying. You are not allowed to just download any picture from any site to your computer. If the site says Copyright at the bottom (Like this one) it means what you see is theirs.

taken from dance.net terms of service:

>>>>>"any material that violates or infringes in any way upon the proprietary rights of others, including, without limitation, copyright or trademark rights; this includes "WAREZ" (copyrighted software that is distributed illegally), "mp3" files of copyrighted music, copyrighted photographs, text, video or artwork. If you don't own the copyright or have express authorization and documented permission to use it, don't put it on your site at dance.net (if you do have express permission you must say so clearly on your dance.net homepage)."

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do not hotlink it from the original website. You're stealing that site owner's bandwidth and that practice is known bandwidth theft.

I didn't know that. Thanks for posting this! Now I will be more careful.

Also, if you have a website and want to see if someone is linking to it, you can go to any search engine and type in link:yoursitename.com

It will show you all the sites that are linking to yours and what files they are linking to.