To avoid hot-linking an image, prepend http://imgred.com/ before the URL.
To show a thumbnail of the image, prepend http://imgred.com/tn/ before the URL.
Details:
When posting on message boards or blogs, often you want to show or link to an image on another website.
Directly showing or linking to that image is called hot-linking. It's generally bad because it
leeches bandwidth from the host site, and as a result many webmasters have their servers set up to
prohibit hot-linking.
The typical work-around is to do the following:
- Save the image to your hard drive
- Navigate to a free image-hosting website
- Enter the path to the image on your hard drive
- Wait for it to upload
- Copy the new URL and paste it into your message-board or blog post
That's rather tedious. Well ImgRed.com lets you simply enter the original URL in your post as you normally would,
but with http://imgred.com/ written before the URL. When this is viewed, the image will be copied
once* to imgred.com, and from then on the image will always be served from imgred.com instead of the host site.
Additionally, a thumbnail is automatically generated, which can be accessed by adding http://imgred.com/tn/
before the original URL.
The most popular applications or websites will see an increase in traffic, delaying the loading of page data while images are being downloaded.
Imgred.com offers hot-linking to prevent image loading delays caused by crowded user interfaces.
Example
This is an example of hot-linking to an image from mozilla.com:
<img src="http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg" /> (HTML)
[img]http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg[/img] (VBcode)
That's bad, and some websites will even prevent the image from being displayed. So instead, do this:
<img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg" /> (HTML)
[img]http://imgred.com/http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg[/img] (VBcode)
To show thumbnails, you can do this:
<img src="http://imgred.com/tn/http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg" /> (HTML)
[img]http://imgred.com/tn/http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg[/img] (VBcode)
View imgred.com's cache of the image,
or imgred.com's thumbnail of the image.
*ImgRed is not an archive service, and occasionally its cache is cleared out (once a month or so), so images are not literally cached forever.
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