Ettiquete for hot linking FHG images?
 

What is considered allowed if you hot link images from an FHG (with the intention of promoting that site of course)?

Do most programs let you, or do they frown on it?

What are the general guidelines for how I can use the images if I am going to hotlink them?

I want to make a list of galleries and then allow the user to easily navigate through the images and display ads for that site, other galleries of that site, and other galleries from other sites of the same model.

It would seem a lot safer on a number of levels to just host them yourself. With permission of course. :2 cents:

General guideline: Don't do it.

Special cases: Discuss it with your sponsor. Most traffic sources won't list you if your images are hotlinked, though

Hotlinking images is a no no in this industry... for instance, try hotlinking an image in this forum without permission and you'll be lynched on so many levels...

I understand your trying to figure out a way to grow without eating more bandwidth, but that is the way things are in this industry... the bigger you are the more bandwidth you consume, and the more your expenses go up.... just hope your revenue does the same :)

I have a different view -- if the hotlink works, it's usually because the program owner consciously chooses to allow hotlinking, otherwise an .htaccess would be preventing it.

That said, anything I'm putting serious development effort into, I want to host myself, so my shit doesn't break when the program tweaks a directory name or something. Bandwidth is still cheap in the grand scheme of things.

So I feel free to hotlink from sponsors that physically allow it, but I rarely do so in practice. My philosophy is, if I'm typing HTML, it better be going somewhere that could potentially still be making me money five years from now. Hotlinking is fundamentally incompatible with that philosophy, because hotlinked shit invariably goes dead faster than shit I host myself.

Thanks for the input guys. I appreciate it. I've heard that some sponsors allow it, and others don't so I was wondering. It sounds like I would be better off for multiple reasons hosting the images myself, so that is what I think I will do.

Have you thought about working with a sponsor that has free hosting?

The only case hotlinking is always perfectly fine are sponsors offering hotlinkable thumbs, handy when mass importing galleries...although I wouldn't really rely on their servers, broken thumbs are a bad thing.

The easiest way to find out is to ask.