The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I was considering starting a blog about, amongst other things, phonographs. It would be a simple visual collection of things dredged up online but I am curious about image credits. I understand its not good to link to someones site directly because they may have to pay for the traffic to their site but if you were to be browsing online and find an image from YOUR website, with a credit "courtesy http://www.somephonographlalala.com" would you mind? If your are selling machines this could be good 'press'. The way around linking is to save the image to my computer, then post it through the blog host. This way the image would have a credit but not be taking up bandwith

Just trying to keep it positive...feedback please!


Thanks

I would not mind it. It could steer a few more people to my site.

Cheers, bruce

USlakeside wrote:I understand its not good to link to someones site directly because they may have to pay for the traffic to their site but if you were to be browsing online and find an image from YOUR website, with a credit "courtesy http://www.somephonographlalala.com" would you mind? If your are selling machines this could be good 'press'. The way around linking is to save the image to my computer, then post it through the blog host. This way the image would have a credit but not be taking up bandwidth...

It took me a moment to figure out what you mean. If I understand you correctly, you’re asking about linking an image on their site somewhere else, and I would generally advise against doing that—one, because some people become very displeased when people ‘hotlink’ their images (particularly without credit), and to a lesser extent, because of bandwidth, although with phonograph sites, there isn’t enough traffic for this to be a concern. The bandwidth issue is one thing if you’re a massively popular site (e.g. Slashdot), but that type of site is a complete different order of magnitude in terms of traffic.

Plus, keep in mind that if they do not know you are hotlinking their images, they may move or rename the images if they make changes to their site, and then these images will disappear from your site. Or they might replace the images with other images (which is something I might be likely to do if I were particularly displeased with someone hotlinking my content without permission). With most web servers, you can serve different content based on the referring page (i.e. visitors who are looking at an image who are not looking at it on your site), and this really isn’t that hard to do. You can also serve different content based on just about any other information that the server sees, such as browser identification or IP address/domain name.

So sometime later you might not be showing your visitors the image that you think you are.

However, some sites actually encourage you to hotlink their content (for example, xkcd, a web comic that a friend of mine brought to my attention).

It’s always best to ask before borrowing someone’s content to display it somewhere else, although there are always ‘fair use’ considerations (e.g. I have no qualms about quoting an eBay listing with photos here, if we are discussing it, or citing other material as long as I link and attribute it).

Like Bruce says:

Valecnik wrote:I would not mind it. It could steer a few more people to my site.

I think that most people would feel this way about it. But ask first if there‘s any concern.

Hope this helps.

— MordEth

Thanks for this feedback. I understood from the beginning that linking was not the way to do this, this is why I mentioned posting them through the blog site, as in you save an image to your desktop, upload it to your blog, and give a photo credit. The linking issues you mention very spot on and I would avoid it.

If it were me, and I saw an image, and there was link to my site, "you can find more cylinder phonographs, "here" (a link)," I would be happy. More traffic. Websites are to be seen!

USlakeside wrote:...this is why I mentioned posting them through the blog site, as in you save an image to your desktop, upload it to your blog, and give a photo credit.

One of the nice features of Photobucket (assuming you use them for your free image hosting) is that they allow you to upload an image from a URL, and so you can just right-click the image, pick ‘Copy Image Location’ (Firefox’s wording¹, other browsers such as Safari and Opera say ‘Copy Image Address’), and paste that URL into the field that Photobucket provides for it.

This way you can skip the downloading and uploading again, and just upload it.

USlakeside wrote:If it were me, and I saw an image, and there was link to my site, "you can find more cylinder phonographs, "here" (a link)," I would be happy. More traffic. Websites are to be seen!

I agree, and I think most people will feel this way, although usually it’s a matter of how the content is used. As long as you give proper credit and aren’t using their images to advertise your site, etc., I think that no-one is likely to mind.

If and when you start your blog, be sure to let us know so we can point some traffic your way.

— MordEth

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¹ I was too lazy to open VMWare to quote Internet Explorer’s wording—a few of our members are still masochistic enough to use it, despite the gaping security holes it has, including a new and rather severe flaw which has already been exploited. I cannot recommend switching to Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome strongly enough. If you use your browser for sites such as eBay, viewing any malicious content (e.g. advertising on innocuous pages) can mean that any personal information stored in your browser—including passwords and banking information could be in someone else’s hands.