Your concern about using Flickr got me looking into the Yahoo’s term of service:

9b:
With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.

Then I read the Flickr Photos FAQ:

If the photo isn’t yours, you may not be able to access the Different Sizes page (if the owner doesn’t allow downloads of the photo).

Note: Per our Terms of Use, whenever you place an image you’re storing on Flickr on an external web site, you must also include a link back to Flickr.

From my own interpretation of these terms, I get the following:

- Flickr gives the right for a user to take what’s in the public areas of the site.
- Flickr wants me to link back to the original Flickr site when the image is used at another site.

So it is ok for me to take photos from that are publicly available via Flickr, and they’re encouraging me to even link back to it.

Besides, if the images that I uploaded are my own photos, I don’t see how Flickr can disallow me to link to my own work. With thousands of images on Flickr, it’s impossible to ensure copyright is enforced. That’s why they’re encouraging Flickr photo owners to make their material private if they don’t want it copied or linked to.

There is one caveat to linking an image directly from Flickr: if they decide to change the URL to the image, I will get a 404 error and get a broken image on my site. If I have a ton of links, it will be painful to fix those broken links.

I recently came across a service called SteadyOffload (http://steadyoffload.com) that provides an innovative, subtle and convenient way to offload images. The whole mechanism there is quite different from ordinary photosharing sites. Instead of permanently uploading your images to another host, their cachebot crawls your site and mirrors the content in a temporary cache on their servers. All you have to do is include a little piece of 1K JavaScript in the head of HTML pages. The image remains stored on your server while it is being delivered from the SteadyOffload cache. The URL of the cached image on their server is very scrambled and is changing often, so you don’t have to worry about hotlinking or copyright issues.

Cost of bandwidth varies between $0.1 and $0.3 per GB depending on the utilization. Performance seems to me pretty good at this point.

It’s definitely worth trying because it’s not a photosharing site like Flickr or Photobucket but exactly a service for offloading static content.

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@JFH:
I also tried and removed Twitter Tools and Yahoo Shortcuts plugins. I need to start boycotting Alex King’s plugins from now on.

I’ve always struggled with images, it’s a long process for me. Finding, editing, uploading, manually link to it, adding titles, etc. I wish there’s a drap/drop solution for the WP editor too.

I actually just took off the ShareThis plugin and switched to Sociable. Much MUCH better in my opinion.

I have to start using another place to host my images…it’s just so easy to use the provided WordPress uploader. I wonder if there’s a plugin that adds a Flickr or Photobucket upload box to the “write” page? That would be awesome.

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