Help: issues with photos

[coffeebean]

i seem to have fairly consistent issues sharing photos on this site.
i have been using the image code:

[img]image url here[/img]

and linking to photos from photobucket, blogger, and picasa.
i can see the photos....no one else can. then occasionally i cant see them either. any ideas? I will try to post some pics here.

from blogger, my snail goldie. i was trying to ask about his shell earlier


from picasa


from photobucket

[coffeebean]

ok, i can see ALL the photos. can anyone else?

[Nick G]

Only the photobucket one

[Shawnie]

yes and what a great one!

[coffeebean]

interesting. well i guess I will just use photo bucket from now on. my other albums are set to public so it just doesnt make any sense to me. who knows...

thanks!

[haedra]

I see all 3.

[agabr123]

i only see picasa and photobucket, not the first

[Lucy]

I only see photo bucket.

[Mike]

I can only see the photobucket pic too. I'm stumped on this one. For the other two I can copy the link, open a new window and the pics display fine. Not sure what the issue is.

[aquarist48]

Just the bucket here as well.

[capekate]

hmmm.... I can click on the two photos, but the one with the link to your blogphoto, I cannot open.

[mathas]

Originally Posted by Mike

I can only see the photobucket pic too. I'm stumped on this one. For the other two I can copy the link, open a new window and the pics display fine. Not sure what the issue is.

Short Answer:
Google tries to prevent hotlinking. Use Photobucket or a similar image host.


Long Answer:
Google tries to prevent hotlinking, but apparently they aren't successful 100% of the time. If you look dig around on the support sites for the respective products, you find:

Blogger

The images we host for you can only be displayed on Blog*Spot sites.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.p...=12532#extlink

Picassa

Google's position is that "hot-linking" is not supported.

For linking through forums or discussion boards, you may have to use an option like Photobucket that gives you [img] pic url [/img].

http://www.google.com/support/forum/...1dca6f04&hl=en

If you look at the links that coffeebean tried to post, you might notice that both the Blogger and Picasa images are hosted at http://lh*.ggpht.com/, so the same hotlink protection would likely be in effect for both sites.

If you do as Mike and I tried, and copy the link then paste it into a new browser window/tab, the picture should load. Since the HTTP referrer is no longer a non-Google site, the hotlinking protection doesn't kick in.

It's certainly not perfect, since some people in this thread saw some of the pictures (I personally saw the Picasa image but not the Blogger one), but it seems to work often enough that most people will probably give up on trying, which I assume was Google's intent.

[haedra]

How come I can see all of them?

[mathas]

Originally Posted by haedra

How come I can see all of them?

I have no idea how Google's attempted hotlink protection works, so I couldn't begin to guess why it works for some and not for others. When I was on my laptop, I could see the Picasa picture but not the Blogger pic... on my desktop, I could see neither. Now that I've copied the image URLs into new tabs to test the hotlink protection, I can see both, since they're in my browser cache.

That's why I said their hotlink protection isn't perfect. But I assume if most people get enough complaints that other forum users can't see their hotlinked images, they will find a new image host.

[Lucy]

Originally Posted by haedra

How come I can see all of them?

Because you're special?

Weird, a few minutes ago I could only see the photo bucket one. Now I can see all three.

Great pics btw.

Edit: Just read matha's post, I guess that's why I can see them also, I copied the link and viewed them that way.

[coffeebean]

weird. thanks for all the answers i will use photobucket from now on

[Mike]

Didn't know that about the hotlinking with blogger and picasa. Thanks mathas!