GRAPHICS GALLERY
Please don't link to any of the pictures on these sites without permission. If you are wondering why, let me explain. . . . .
It is all a matter of bandwidth, and bandwidth theft is a huge problem on the internet. That said, do you know what bandwidth is?
Bandwidth is the measurement of useage of a website, measured in bytes, and for most people is charged monthly. When you go to a website, and the page starts to load, that uses bandwidth. Every thing you see on a website, every picture, graphic, video, all use bandwidth.
If you find something you like at a web site, such as a picture, or a cartoon, or a piece of clip art, and you decide to use it on your own web page, or post it in on a message board, and use the "copy and paste" method, you are using someone else's bandwidth.
That item remains on the server where you found it, and even though you are pasting it to another web page, it is still using bandwidth from where you got it. If you link to it, that is the same thing. Every time someone views the image you linked to, it uses bandwidth on the host's site.
Have you ever gone to a website and received the message that it is temporarily down having exceeded their allocated transfer for the day? That is a result of too much bandwidth being used in a particular time period and the host shuts down the website.
The fact is most people who steal bandwidth, do it completely unaware. They don't realize the huge costs incurred by the owners of the web sites or the web hosts. Many free media sites have disappeared because of this problem and that is why almost all of the free sites have banned hot linking. Some of the message boards take bandwidth theft very seriously and anyone caught faces being banned from the community.
To prevent bandwidth theft, you MUST save photos and graphics correctly. Do not copy the graphic and paste it into any web page and do not link to it. You MUST right click and select "save picture as". This puts the item into a file on your own computer and disconnects it from the server. From the file on your computer, you can upload it to your web page and then link to it.