Photos on my Forums

Is it better to host them on own site?

[camweh]

Would there be any benifit in me hosting photo's on my own site that I post to other forums rather than using photobucket. Would the url mysite.com/images/photo.jpg help my site in any way.

[linear]

A couple benefits I can think of:
+ Image search traffic can be surprisingly good.
+ Some photo hosting sites can be blocked by corporate web filters, so you maintain the integrity of your posts better when the images are locally hosted. (Provided you don't get blocked by the same corporate filters that is)

You may want to consider some kind of hotlink prevention so that you don't wind up unknowingly hosting pics for ebay auctions, etc.

[Pfui]

If they're your own photos, all shot by you, self-hosting is fine. And if you're an eBay seller, self-hosting will save you money in fees!

But --

If they're not your own photos, if you found one or more online and want to take 'em and put even one on your server, not cool. In fact, so not cool as to be violating the original owners' copyrights. And doing that can get you in hot water legally, and even more immediately, with your ISP.

But --

If they're your own photos, you'll probably also want to think about how to protect them from being used in posts -- and with you paying for the bandwidth, too... The Apache Web Server Forum [webmasterworld.com] has info about using .htaccess and mod_rewrite to protect your $tuff.

[camweh]

Thanks guys, that gave me a few things to consider not the least being the hot linking though eBay wouldn't be a problem as they're not photo's of articles.