Why you shouldn’t directly link to images

If you’re going to “borrow” a funny or neat image from another website, it’s generally considered bad form to just link directly to it in your code so that your webpage grabs the image from the creator’s website and loads it when someone looks at yours. Assuming you’ve got any business using the image in the first place, you should instead make a copy and put it on your website. Linking directly to an image like this, for example, pulls the file from my web server, costing me bandwidth and wreaking havoc with my traffic logs.

The traffic logs, in fact, were how I found out that one message board user on another site was linking directly to the picture of the sniper kitty in this story. The site in question was the messageboards of RonaldReagan.com. Now, another reason you shouldn’t link directly to an image on my site is that once I know you’re doing it, I can change the image to anything that I want, and it will appear on your site as long as I leave the file name the same. At this point I considered changing the sniper kitty image to something really obscene and offensive. You know, just to teach them a lesson. However, I didn’t exactly relish the idea of searching for and then working with that kind of imagery.

So, given that this site was populated by Reagan loving, ultra-conservative blowhards, I decided to go another route. Here’s a picture of the forum thread in question before I changed it:

And here’s what it looked like after I changed it:

I don’t think they’ve noticed yet, but I like it better this way.