blogging 102 | Localizing Images

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

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.

The first step  is upload the plugins and install both plugins.  You will either need to use your ftp program or file management system on your server to create a directory upload in the Hot link Image Cache plugin folder and set the file permissions to 777.  Your first time running the HLIC plugin you will want to run it with the all setting to cache every static image you are hotlinking too.  After this time you can run for individual posts by simply using the post ID number.  The downside to this plugin is it puts everything in its own upload directory rather than the standard uploads directory.  On the plus side of this plugin it leaves any link you had associated with the image intact so you don’t have to worry about affiliate links getting broken.  This was my original intent in using the plugin, a program I run on another site requires me to host all the images and one post had ninety seven separate images linking to the advertiser page.

The second step is move the image files to your uploads directory.  The safest way to do this is download the contents of you HLIC plugin upload folder, then upload the contents to your uploads folder.  The big reason for this is when you go to export and import the data from another site the automatic uploading of images only recognizes the /wp-content/uploads/ folder when importing imagesm using a 755 permission set it is also a more secure directory.  You could simply use your FTP program to move the directory contents but should something go wrong with the url changes you could find yourself having problems.  When the folder contents are uploaded it is time to run the Update Urls command.  Start by inserting http://myblog.com/wp-content/plugins/hot-linked-image-cacher/upload/  then changing it to http://myblog.com/wp-content/uploads/.  It is a simple efficient process and I have never had a failure when changing this, but never think it can’t happen to you.  The downside of this plugin is it doesn’t alter the data in your meta data fields, which can be problematic if you have changed domain names and link through the meta data fields to such niceties as thumbnail images for every post.  The plus side is it makes updating any and every url in your blog extremely easy.

My last word on hotlinking is if you are worried about your original images then you should be using some for of hotlinking protection.  There are a couple of wordpress plugins, but most effectily are your server side options.