Better to Upload Pictures or Link to Flickr?

The major advantage to using a third party service, like Flickr, is that you won’t be using your own bandwidth to serve the image. On the other hand, you’d be relying on a third-party service that can have unexpected glitches and downtime.

If you want absolute control over your images, and don’t care about bandwidth consumption, upload them directly. If you’re concerned about bandwidth consumption, but don’t mind the occasional problems that come with relying on a third party, use something like Flickr.

Thanks for that, Macmanx. It makes me wonder why companies like Flickr aren’t worried about their bandwidth being used up. I’m guessing it would be because when people click on a linked picture in a blog, they would be taken to the Flickr site, and that’s good advertising for them.

I’ve had this question on my mind because I recently tried out a new theme for my blog. The theme had a thumbnail feature, but it wouldn’t work with pictures stored on Flickr. It will only work with pictures that have been uploaded directly to the blog’s server.

It got me thinking that there might be a hundred other “gotcha”s like that waiting for me down the road if I continued to use links to Flickr.

You’re welcome!

Images really don’t eat up too much bandwidth. I think the “cost” of the bandwidth that they’d require is well worth the control that you get from uploading and serving them yourself.

It got me thinking that there might be a hundred other “gotcha”s like that waiting for me down the road if I continued to use links to Flickr.

If I’m not mistaken, Flickr has TOS for linking to their pics. You’d have to look at flickr to be sure, but I believe if you link to any pics on their site, you have to include with the pic the fact that it is linked to flickr. I don’t remember exactly how, like just text, or if you have to have their logo or what…..

I’m still (slooooowly) figuring out how WordPress handles images, and I came across another very big problem with using Flickr links in my blog. Just thought I’d put it here in case anyone is following this thread.

I didn’t understand previously what galleries were in WordPress. I thought they were just folders where you stored images. However, they are more than that. You can insert a gallery into posts and pages. However, for images to be included in a gallery, they have to be uploaded to your site. Any images on your blog that are links to an image on Flickr can’t be included in a gallery. For me, that is a big reason to upload directly to the site rather than use links to Flickr.