TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

ImgRed.com - Fast, Easy, & Polite Image Hotlinking

If you’re FARKer, then you’ll regularly encounter “no hotlinking” or “bandwidth exceeded” graphics, from people that have posted images hotlinked from other sites, or hosted by weak services. Booo. ImgRed.com offers an alternative in the style of DuggMirror - pre-pend your image link with “http://imgred.com/” and ImgRed will grab, cache, thumbnail, and serve the picture for you.

Here’s an example of my favorite graphic from ValleyWag:

And here’s the code I used to do it:

<a href="http://imgred.com/http://valleywag.com/assets/resources/ASE4.jpg"><img src="http://imgred.com/tn/http://valleywag.com/assets/resources/ASE4.jpg"></a>

Simple, fast, effective. A great time saver for me (no saving, photoshopping, ftp’ing, etc.), and I’m not slamming ValleyWag with the no-doubt massive traffic that TechFold generates.

So - here’s the question:

What’s in it for ImgRed? I’m guessing that any attempt to monetize cached images by watermarking ads or whatnot will get into C&D territory very rapidly. Nor does ImgRed have any fundamentally serious IP that they can license or sell - the PHP GD library makes building such functionality trivial, and even creating a robust hosting system could be streamlined with Amazon S3.

So — perhaps ImgRed is just a useful, free service from a frustrated person. That’s cool, but if it catches on, its going to get expensive for them quickly. In the meantime, thanks!

EDIT: What’s the legality of caching anyway? Google does it for searching, therefore can ImgRed do it for sharing?

EDIT 2: Here’s a thought: ImgRed could index the pages on which they serve pictures, and use that data as metadata surrounding the image in question to create a great image search tool.

One Response to “ImgRed.com - Fast, Easy, & Polite Image Hotlinking”

Forrest | April 14th, 2007 at 12:41 am

You’re question what’s in it for them is a good one. They don’t mention this on their site, nor do they have any contact info, a way to opt-out, or any information about what happens to the images that collect on their servers.

A person could describe this as polite, while another would call it copyright violation on a massive scale. Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days; I’d rather have an image hotlinked than taken and republished out of my control. And with all the secrecy surrounding imgRed, I’m just not comfortable with the situation.

I’ve written an article on how to opt-out of this new service by blocking imgRed from your site, if anybody else shares my concerns: http://forrestcroce.com/Articles/Protecting-Digital-Images.html