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Localizing images on your wordpress blog often times is a tedious task, but something you need to do if you want to avoid hotlinking images in your blog. I hate hotlinking to images for several reasons. The first and foremost reason is it is bad form and impolite if you don’t have permission. The second thing is you have no idea when, if or how that file might change. This is less of a problem these days since disk space is cheap and people are often using image hosting services such as flickr. In the old days though it was not uncommon for perverse webmasters to put up pornographic pictures using the same title that was being hotlinked too. I remember seeing several business meetings go awry from this and learned quickly just how bad this practice can be.
Do I still hotlink even knowing the potential dangers? The answer is yes and no. I often times grab an image on the fly when I am posting, especially if I’m using Scribefire or Windows Live Writer and not working directly with the wordpress interface. That said I never do it for very long, usually long enough to get back to my desk and work on my blog properl, never more than a day.
There is a way to easily fix your hotlinking problems with wordpress plugins once you sit down to do it. To make the most of this process you will need an ftp program and for windows users I recommend FileZilla. The two plugins you will want to have are Hot Linked Image Cacher and Velvet Blues Update URLs.
