Reply #4: Here you go: "How to link in pictures without stealing bandwidth!" [View All]

[emulatorloo]

How to link in pictures without stealing bandwidth! by Ben
Burch

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=339904

This works for most pictures. 

Say you have a picture you want to use in a posting; 

http://foobar.com/JulieNewmar.jpg 

Now, if you just link it to your LJ posting, you immediately
start stealing bandwidth from foobar.com.

This is simply not a nice thing to do as some websites pay
for every byte they transfer. 

If you change that URL a little; 

http://foobar.com.nyud.net:8090/JulieNewmar.jpg 

It then uses a free public caching service. It gets fetched
ONCE from foobar.com, and they are not made bankrupt as each
of LJ's horny guys look at your Catwoman picture. 

It helps to preview the posting before you hit post as this
gets the caching service to do the initial fetch of the
picture, which can be slow, before your posting appears to
the public. Sometimes you need to wait a few minutes and
re-preview it before everything will appear as it should, and
some web servers will not play ball with the cache, and this
is how you weed those out. 

ENJOY!