Photo filenames

[McTaggart]

I am looking at a website and have noticed that there are lots of photos living on different domain - so I imagine they're coming through from another website - e.g. the domain I'm looking at is www.chocolatecakeszoopla.com - the images on that domain name feature the third-party website's url - e.g.: www.chocolatecakestockimages.com/chocolatecakeicing.jpg - is this anything to worry about?

I was imagining the pics would feature the same URL as the rest of the website - that would be more logical? Would it be better practice to amend image names to feature the URL of the site they appear on, or doesn't this really matter?

Thanks, Luke

[Linda-Vassily]

Linking to an image on another site, sometime referred to as inline linking or hotlinking, can be a big no-no for a variety of reasons, including theft of bandwidth usage.

However it is possible that the same entity owns both the first site and the site on which the image is hosted, and they chose to do it that way.

[badgergravling]

Hotlinking is definitely a bad idea - it can often lead to the original site changing the images to prank anyone known to be using them for example. Or if the original site goes offline, it'll take out your site as well.

It really depends on the website ownership and also the purpose. I know you were using examples, but if the second site is a specific stock image site, for example, they may consciously want to promote that site for images...

[TimHolmes]

I agree with both Dan and Linda on this - hot linking in general is not the way to go. However, like Linda mentioned they may own both domains and be using the second like a content delivery network to enable them to parallelise there requests helping to speed up the site as multiple browser requests can take place at the same time and reduce load time. You could also use a third party CDN for greater speed if you are a global brand.

[McTaggart]

Thanks everyone for your helpful feedback - much appreciated.