Heya! I’m seeing a lot of folks struggling with this so let me give a simple explanation.
1. You want the direct link to the image itself. The url should end with the file type such as .png or .gif otherwise it will not work
2. To obtain a direct link there are a number of websites one can use to generate one. I personally use imgbox.com but filegarden.com is also popular. I can’t recommend Imgur these days but it exists.
3. Do Not upload the image to discord and use that url. Discord clears out their image files regularly. And I think that’s technically hotlinking anyway
4. Which brings me to: if the image is already on A Website, download or copypaste it to one of the image sharing websites mentioned above. “Hotlinking” is the act of grabbing and embedding an image from elsewhere which can cause bandwidth issues for the original site. (This is why neocities has a rule against this!)
I hope you find these basics useful and if this is your first foray into forums have fun 
thanks for the pointers 👍
check me out at acetyzias.tumblr.com and acelad.crockercorp.com on bsky
just a lil bump... because this still seems to be confusing ppl....
thank you autumn for carrying the image posting community
thank you this helped me a lot! ive never posted on forums before it would be cool if someone would make a guide to this kind of stuff n maybe like etiquette as well... also would linking to a tumblr picture be hotlinking?
re: maris
if you just link To the picture or post then it’s fine because the person clicks (or in our case copy-pastes) the link and goes to the original website but if you Embed the image using the little button as I describe here that’s hotlinking. does that make sense? like if you use the tumblr version of the image link then it basically pokes tumblr and goes “hey I need that picture again” every time someone loads the post that picture is on. It’s probably not as bad for tumblr as it is for say discord (this is even the reason given for Why they started to clear out images) but it’s just Proper to use one of those dedicated websites that are made to be poked :P
So! General rule of thumb: just don’t embed from a website unless it’s one of those img sites that are built for that. Its good practice for when making webpages too! most website builders will just let you upload them directly but stuff like neopet petpages you gotta link from elsewhere
…sorry neopets was The only example I could think of lol
I use catbox.moe entierly because everytime you load the site they put a new anime girl in the corner. also its like super easy drag and drop which is cool. but mostly the anime girls
Please foward all messages to your mothers house
Any particular reason why you don't recommend imgur? It's the one I typically use, and I haven't had many issues. But maybe I'm missing something.
@spritesquad
once upon a time imgur was the best of the best. It was simple, fast, ad-free, and not trying to be a social media platform. And now if you use adblock most of the time it doesnt matter but there have been various points in time where it would do the "pwease disable ur adblocker" type thing and my god i just checked to make sure its fine with an adblocker and they sure are leaning heavily on being a social platform huh wow. it has games now.
but yeah for a lot of ppl as soon as they started being weird about adblock and pushing meme generators in your face that was sign to jump ship because it was only gonna get worse from there and the sooner you find good alternatives the better bc otherwise when the whole thing becomes an unusable bloated mess to appease the VC funders youll be left scrambling.
in short: ive seen this happen many times before, and imgur is walking a dark path.