Instructions for links to photos

Post by **Joanna Carter** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 4:12 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Just a test picture

...and some text after

Post by **Joanna Carter** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 4:18 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

OK, here's a checklist for folks trying to post links to images :

1. add an Img tag by using the button

2. Add the url for the image

a. it must start with http://
b. it is case sensitive
c. if there are any spaces in the file path, get rid of them

3. add a closing /Img tag using the button

Try editing your posts, following these rules. Here is a sample with the tags broken up so that you can see the text rather than the picture.

[
img
]
http://
www.grandes-images.com/images/RustyBarge.jpg
[
/img
]

You will also notice that just putting the url without the img tags gives a link rather than showing the image.

Does this help ? I will be checking

Post by **Charles Twist** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 6:23 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Hello Jo,
We got that far!
To take Chong's pic as an example, here is what he wrote in his original message
[img
]http://gallery.photo.net/photo/4739118-lg.jpg[
/img]
All on one line naturally. You can copy any one of his URL's and they will lead you to a picture; it's not a spelling mistake problem.
What is remarkable is that your picture shows up perfectly; strange.
Charles

Tim Myers · Post by **Tim Myers** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 7:37 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

The problem doesn't lie here - it's an issue at photo.net.

A quick network capture shows that when referred by the BB here photo.net is issuing an HTML document in an attempt to redirect your browser to

http://hosting.photo.net/photodb/image- ... 18&size=lg

For anyone who's interested, this is the network capture:

Code: Select all

GET /photo/4739118-lg.jpg HTTP/1.1

Accept: */*

Referer: http://www.lf-photo.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=65

Accept-Language: en-gb

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

If-Modified-Since: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:54:46 GMT; length=127461

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2)

Host: gallery.photo.net

Connection: Keep-Alive



HTTP/1.0 302 Found

Location: http://hosting.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=4739118&size=lg

MIME-Version: 1.0

Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 18:27:21 GMT

Server: AOLserver/4.0

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 347

Connection: close



<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Redirection</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H2>Redirection</H2>
<A HREF="http://hosting.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=4739118&size=lg">The requested URL has moved here.</A>
<P ALIGN=RIGHT><SMALL><I>AOLserver/4.0 on http://gallery.photo.net</I></SMALL></P>

</BODY></HTML>

When your browser sees the img tag it expects an image - not a redirect.

Post by **Joanna Carter** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:19 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

If this redirect is going to be a problem, then perhaps those using sites like photo.net should add a straightforward link rather than an img tagged link ?

Although this doesn't seem to show the image directly by clicking on the link (in IE6 this gives a not authorised error), at least folks can then copy the link to a new browser window.

If anyone has any better solutions to this problem, which only seems to happen with these redirecting sites, then please contribute

Apple · Post by **Apple** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 12:38 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Just trying a few straight cut and paste options from my photobucket account...

URL:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/0903/ ... apple2.jpg

Tag:
<a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/0903/ ... apple2.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting"></a>

Img:

I'll let the techy bods sort out the nuts and bolts of that lot but I know the img option generally works.

Secondly, if you want to insert a URL with a description showing instead of the address, the tags need altering, e.g.

Standard url via above buttons http://www.viewcamera.com/index.html

URL with description, e.g. View Camera site

I presume this is normal or the buttons don't expect you to be flash and use a description?

Andrew

Tim Myers · Post by **Tim Myers** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 12:53 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Photo.net are trying to stop people using images hosted on their website from other sites. If you click the link on a page here you get a 403 'Not Authorised' error - but if you copy the link and paste it in to your browser you get to see the image.

Photonet are obviously checking the HTTP-REFERER header to decide if the image is being used by other sites directly.

This doesn't seem to be an issue with other free image hosting sites such as Photobucket as shown by apple.

Could I make a suggestion that someone (I'm happy to do this unless anyone else wishes to) investigates the various popular free hosting sites out there to see if any more prevent linking to pictures in this way, and then writes an FAQ which we can make sticky and replace this sticky which is probably too long now to be useful?

Maybe this thread should be moved in to General?

Tim

percepts · Post by **percepts** » Sat Aug 12, 2006 2:51 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

many web sites block direct linking to images on their site.

It's called HOT LINKING and it is frowned upon because it uses the bandwith of the site the image is hosted on and is considered to be bandwidth theft by many. i.e. you would be using photo.net servers bandwidth to fill this site with images at no cost to this site.

On apache web servers its easily stopped by using a .htaccess file which then only allows images to be served to pages originating at the owners site.

Best to put a link to an html page containing the image.

The reason it works direct to your own browser is that the .htaccess commands have not been set to block a blank referer which is what your browser will send with the request for the image. Its not really necessary to block direct requests from a browser since they are likely to be very very few whereas a link from a website could cause many many thousands of image requests.