Forum:Image hotlinking

http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

Image hotlinking is enabled in Wikia (see the Google logo above). I have three questions regarding this feature:
 * 1) Is it legal? Images we upload in a Wikia wiki must be under a free license such as GFDL or CC-BY (or constitute Fair Use). But hotlinked images are technically not part of our wiki, so the Wikia image policy doesn't apply, I suppose. So we could use this to include images that are not under a free license?
 * 2) Image hotlinking is bandwidth theft. Also, the site that hosts the image may not like the placement in our wiki. Does Wikia, or particular wikis, have policies regarding image hotlinking?
 * 3) Is it possible to resize a hotlinked image?

The reason of my questions is this: one of my wiki's members is an artist who publishes his artwork in a blog. He asked me if it was okay to hotlink his own images. --Spankart 12:02, 20 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't know about the first two question, but as far as I know, resizing hotlinked images is not possible in MediaWiki. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 13:33, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * For individual wiki, The Gaiapedia does not allow external images in articles. But also does not allow personal images and instead tells users to use a free image host to put images on their userpages. Resizing can't be done except for with css... And that's just a size change, the actual image size doesn't change like how MediaWiki does. Though, generally it's not nice to hotlink from other sites. I generally do not allow image hotlinking in wiki I administrate. "If it's good enough to be put in an article then it's good enough to be uploaded to the wiki instead of embedded. If it's not good enough to be uploaded then why do you think we need it in an article?". As for that blog, you should warn him that Wikia has high traffic, and hotlinking from his blog will probably quickly deplete his bandwidth and possibly destroy his blog in the WCS . ~Dantman(talk) tricks May 20, 2007 @ 19:21 (UTC)


 * Well, my wiki does not allow the uploading of unfree, copyrighted images under a Fair Use claim; it requires every uploader to specify the source and license that allows the free/copyleft use of the image. So there are lots of images that we'd like to use but which we are not allowed to upload even if they were definitely "good enough" to upload. --Spankart 15:46, 30 May 2007 (UTC)


 * We are working on a way (conceptually) to limit external image embedding to approved hosts (like *.wikia.com, *.uncyclopedia.org, upload.wikimedia.org, and custom ones for each wikia), but this is probably a ways off. Also, some wikis like wikifur do not allow external images at all. --Splarka (talk) 05:15, 21 May 2007 (UTC)