What about when you use pictures from other websites? It’s sometimes cool to be able to link to an image from someone else’s website for sharing purposes. When you feel lazy, that’s the fastest route, right? Wrong. Webmasters from these locations can usually easily identify when photos from their site are being ripped (linked) for viewing on another. If you do that on a public forum, it only makes matters worse – for the webmaster that is. Every time your post is viewed, it drives a lot of useless traffic to the site from which you ripped the photo; the end result being that the picture is docked. Your avatar (or whatever picture you linked directly to) will then appear like a broken link. And you know how un-cool that can be…

So why not host your pictures online? It’s fast and extremely easy to do so! You can host your self portraits, funny pictures you want to share, your avatar(s), your desktop screenshots, digital camera shots of social events, portraits of your tricked out box and whatever else you want to post on the forums. It’s actually a LOT easier than you think! When you link your photos to the forums via another website which was designed specifically for doing such tasks, the advantages are:

1. You free yourself of the size and/or resolution limitations that the forums may have.

2. Others get to see the pictures the way you intended them to be seen without the need for you to be fumbling around in Photoshop or a similar application to do any resizing, thereby dropping the images’ quality.

3. Creating a centralized area for your pictures so that you can easily share them not only on the forums, but with just about anybody, anywhere. They can see the pictures whenever and however often they want, without asking you for it each time – even in email with HTML support.

4. You don’t need to have a website up even though some of these sites allow you to host a website at no cost.

5. Most sites allow you to host the pictures for free.

6. Pictures can be shown to anyone anywhere by just using the http link.

7. Increasing the page throughput for forums, by reducing the amount of bandwidth required to serve up pages totally filled with pictures since your pictures will be coming from a separate web host. That means the pages will load a lot faster for viewers as images are loaded afterwards.