This morning I received an email from a reader who had a question about my article on making bingo game boards in Google Sheets. Her question was essentially, “why won’t Pixabay images show up on the board?” The answer is that Pixabay doesn’t allow hotlinking its images.
In a nutshell, hotlinking is inserting a picture into a blog post through a URL rather than uploading the image file itself to your blog. You can read more about hotlinking on the Simple English Wikipedia or on Host Gator’s page about preventing hotlinking to your own work.
Why you and your students should avoid hotlinking.
Hotlinking itself isn’t bad if you’re only linking to images that you own and control online. For example, let’s say that you have a Flickr account to which you upload dozens of pictures that you took. You could use the embed code or the link that Flickr provides to post your images in your blog post.
When hotlinking causes trouble is when you link to another person’s image hosted in their account or on their servers. Even if the image is in the public domain you probably don’t want to hotlink to it. In fact some services, like Pixabay which hosts public domain images, block attempts at hotlinking. They block hotlinking because when you hotlink you’re using more of their bandwidth than if you simply downloaded the image to your computer then uploaded it to your blog.
The biggest concern about hotlinking is not knowing exactly who or what you’re linking to. As Sue implied in her Tweet this morning, it is possible that the image you linked to and the image displayed could be changed without warning. It’s also possible that the link a student inserts to hotlink links back to site or host laden with malware that could then rain down havoc on your blog.
