The ability to hotlink to images is an important part of ImageHost.org. However some users have been abusing this feature by hotlinking to large full size images from very active message boards. For this reason I’ve tweaked the hotlinking rules to discourage this practice. Any image you want to hotlink to now needs to be less than 250 KB in size and the image’s resolution needs to be less than 1000×1000 pixels.

These new limits should hardly bother anyone wanting to use ImageHost to hotlink to an avatar or signature, but will prevent users from hotlinking to say, their wallpaper collection. You can of course still upload images that go over these limits, but you will need to use thumbnail or text links instead.

I realize there may be users who just want to share their images and don’t know or can’t be bothered with resizing those images to acceptible sizes, so I’ve added a resize feature to my “to do” list. Once this feature is done, you can have ImageHost.org resize the images to acceptible size after upload for you. Unfortunately I can not give an ETA on this feature though.

Update March 13: It seems a pretty major bug caused hotlinking to images of any size or resolution to be not allowed, which confused one important ImageHost.org user (my mother) a lot. This bug has now been fixed – I apologize for any inconvinience caused. In addition I’ve upped the limits a bit (500 KB & 1600×16000 pixels), so only considerably large images will not be eligable for hotlinking.

Update March 23: Received some complaints, hotlinking is currently back to old limits again.