Internet & Society Course Blog

You may want to add images to your posts. Here is how to go about it.

First: what not to do. Do not link to an image on someone else’s Web site directly. Each time someone looks at a Web page in their browser, the image will have been downloaded to their machine. This means that you are using up bandwidth from that person’s account.

Instead of linking (or what’s called “hot linking”) to someone’s image on another site, create a local copy. Of course, you should only proceed with this if you know that the particular license associated with the image allows copying.

The problem with creating a local copy in our case is that you don’t have rights to upload images to your blog directory. So what to do?

Here’s an option: you can post it on an image-hosting site and link to it there. Such hot-linking is okay.

You may consider creating a free account on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Yahoo! owns Flickr so if you have a Yahoo! account then you can just use that.

Once you have a free account on Flickr, you can upload up to 200 images to your account (there are some limits on how much you can upload per month). Flickr then gives you the option of looking at different sizes of your images and choosing one for inclusion on your Web site.

You click on an image to view it. You then click on the All Sizes button above it. The thumbnail or small version would work well for blogs. Here is an example of both:

You don’t have to figure out the code with which to include your images in a blog post, Flickr gives it to you automatically. In fact, the system even lets you blog about an image straight from the site. Just click on the link above the link that says “Blog this” and follow the instructions.