hotlinking allowed?

hospitalera · #1 (**permalink**) 01-06-2007, 12:54 PM

Hi, I am just building a portfolio site and would like to "hotlink" to my pictures on FP, is that allowed? Example here: http://www.freewebs.com/hospitalera/

SY

mangia · #2 (**permalink**) 01-06-2007, 06:32 PM

Yes it is allowed. You can use frames and scripts if you like. They are very easy for setup.

kris · #3 (**permalink**) 01-10-2007, 07:43 PM

I have my own site and nearly every image is linked to an image on feature pice
Good for you and good for their ratings

Elena · #4 (**permalink**) 01-14-2007, 05:57 AM

Kris, I agree.

The direct link from your page is better that a link from iframe. Good job!

FlemishDreams · #5 (**permalink**) 01-20-2007, 12:46 PM

The iframe piece of script is a very rich attribute, since you have total control over the style (unlike Dreamstime banners). That lets you make it fit very easily the design of your page.

You can for instance present a random 4x3 overview of your portfolio on your main page with a common border, without the iframe becoming apparent.
You can see an example on the main page of http://www.flemishdreams.com wich uses a Joomla CMS (2 colums, 600px body), and the landing page is just an article in the static content. But of course, you could use it on any simple flat HTML page.

The code goes like this:

Code:

"lesser than" character, then
IFRAME src='http://www.featurepics.com/Authors/top5Images.aspx?id=XXX&
number=4&bgcolor=ffffff&type=g&order=random' width='600' height='135' style='BORDER-RIGHT:
#dddddd 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: #dddddd 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px' border='0' MARGINWIDTH='0'
MARGINHEIGHT='0' SCROLLING='no' FRAMEBORDER='0'></IFRAME>


Replace id=XXX by your ID, which you can find on FP, when logged in, under the menu item "HTML snippets".

and you repeat this block 3 times, with the border attribute set to this for the first block:

Code:

BORDER-RIGHT:
#dddddd 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #dddddd 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #dddddd 1px solid; BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px

this for the second and following blocks (except the last):

Code:

BORDER-RIGHT:
#dddddd 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: #dddddd 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px'

and this for the last row:

Code:

BORDER-RIGHT:
#dddddd 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: #dddddd 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #dddddd 1px solid'

You can of course adapt the color of your border (#dddddd) or the size at wish. You also have to count how many images will fit in your design, and adapt the row count (the number= parameter) accordingly.

If you want your site to be search-engine friendly, well, robots don't crawl through iframes, nor through javascript or any dynamic content like Flash, fancy slide-generators, or images generated on the fly as the result of a menu action in a gallery by php-mysql. You will have to hard-code in HTML all the links somewhere on your landing page or on level 2 pages (make sure there are no more than 5 level 2 pages then), preferably with the img alt= attribute set to your main keywords. That way, Google images will pick up the image and tag it appropriately. Search bots don't crawl beyond level 3 pages on a site, nor through more than 6-7 pages on any level or 20-30 pages in total.

Use the robots.txt feature to direct search bots to a few appropriate pages when you have a large, complex site.

Finally a word of caution about putting unwatermarked usable photos on your site (even with the 'save as' right mouse-click disabled). Google Images will pick them up and cache them, and they are then available for free. And disable deep-linking on your server or you are emulating Mother Theresa with your bandwidth ;-)

Elena · #6 (**permalink**) 01-21-2007, 02:17 AM

Hugo, do you think we should make one more snippet to combine 3 "iframe" calls? Should be faster...
Do you think we need to talk about sitemap as well?
It is a good tool to use when you are working with google.

Peiling · #7 (**permalink**) 01-21-2007, 07:36 AM

yes, iframe link is great ;-) I love it.

You can see an example in my website here:-

http://www.freewebs.com/mygardenofed...tockphotos.htm

FlemishDreams · #8 (**permalink**) 01-23-2007, 03:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elena

Hugo, do you think we should make one more snippet to combine 3 "iframe" calls? Should be faster...

Well I think the iframe now is OK as it is, the basic script has it all. It's not too difficult, given some HTML-CSS knowdlegde, to play with it. I don't think many people will use it, given that most photographers are not that proficient with web-techniques. The ones that are know their way already. The most important thing is that the iframe object has its style properties exposed, unlike the banner in DT where the style of the image titles is hard-coded and can't be altered with a style or stylesheet. In fact, you can just add this snippet as an addendum or example to the iframe.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elena

Do you think we need to talk about sitemap as well?
It is a good tool to use when you are working with google.

I think that's overkill and out of focus for a RF photography site. There are many resources available for SEO (search engine optimisation) for those that have their own website. In my humble opinion, FP should give priority to enhancing its own web-visibilty in the benefit of all and not provide out of focus services (how friendly that might be) to contributors which might have their own agenda. Woops, I'm tough :P

A set of links might be OK, like https://www.google.com/webmasters/to.../en/about.html but there are many more. The idea of the collections with their meta-info fed into the searchbots is great. Also one should not underestimate the future importance of Google Images, like Google was for text. I don't know what Google has in the pipeline for that, but somebody will soon invent an image "google" that can crawl all over the images on the net, like a super-search over all RF sites. Tagging is like always the key.
My basic 2 cents would be that whoever puts an image on the net leaves the IPTC info intact (PS "save for web" doesnt) and applies a visible watermark with a link to a purchase medium.

Some musings...

Out of some earlier blogpost:
Information is useless unless you know where to find it easily. So much around of it nowadays on the Web that finding the right piece of it is a daunting task.

The same holds even more for images, as we don't have an artificial vision search engine yet that can find exactly what we want. For the time being, we will have to rely on text and tag our images with relevant keywords, and that's it.

So both the image provider and the image shopper have to rely heavily on correct, descriptive and unambiguous textual tags in order to spot each other and to conclude a sale. [...]

From a stochastic viewpoint, the current search algorithms are bound to break down soon on sites that offer 1,000,000+ images, and this purely for statistical reasons.

Out of the same post:
RF Stock sites try to address the accurateness of their search results by fine-tuning their search algorithm all the time. And just like with Google Rage-Ranking?, it's a bit of black magic and a well kept secret how they do it exactly.

Now imagine this: the linear isolated keyword search won't be around that much longer. Language is words in context and we don't have to be neither Chomsky nor a NLP guru to realize that 'fruit flies like a banana' (Groucho Marx) can have two different meanings while the words and even the syntax are the same.

IstockPhoto took on this issue when it required disambiguation of tags, while Fotolia uses a keyword search algorithm based on assigning more relevance to the (7?) keywords ranked first than to the next ones. No doubt other agencies will follow along this path sooner or later, with the advent of 1,000,000+ image sites and hundreds of images returned on a search quest. Big problemo though. Most RF Stock databases rank their tags alphabetically and the submitter's embedded IPTC keyword ranking reflecting importance is lost. [...]

I wild redo this post soon. Actually I'm writing a tool that anticipates on this evolution to tag all my new images, but it's still in alpha phase. As soon as it's beta, I'll post it.

FlemishDreams · #9 (**permalink**) 01-23-2007, 03:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peiling

You can see an example in my website here:

Hahaha, I was there a litttle bit later that day ;-)

but I got my feet wet ;-)

Elena · #10 (**permalink**) 01-23-2007, 08:04 AM

"My basic 2 cents would be that whoever puts an image on the net leaves the IPTC info intact (PS "save for web" doesnt) and applies a visible watermark with a link to a purchase medium."

IPTC information reflects what an "Author" thinks about the image. It would be the same, as if you placed this information around the image as plain text. All IPTC titles, captions, and key words are presented in some form on all pages. Do you think? I am sure they are reading this information already.
But...

Have you checked "Google Image Labeler"?
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
"Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results.
" - doesn't look like Google is trying to use iptc tags to improve the search.
They are cooking up something else.

And...
http://www.featurepics.com/Editorial/Alipr.aspx - Software recognizes and describes images in words - only one example.

And...
"Picsearch image search technology has three main features that make it unique. It has a relevancy unrivalled on the web due to its patent-pending indexing algorithms"
What is the patent-pending all about??