I basically run a blog on my site and have my own personal gallery (Coppermine Gallery) that I upload most of my picture, and occasionally link to and embed them from my blog posts. Lately, I've been wondering if it's more efficient to outsource to an established provider like Flickr.

I like Flickr because of it's ease of use and navigation, and lots of 3rd party tools around for it (stuff like desktop clients for uploading), which I find lacking in others.

How do you guys hosts your images and what do you think?

Personally, I get a lot of visits from Google Images, so that's enough of a reason for me to host my own. I don't know whether they would send traffic to the flickr page the image is also found on, or if they're not that sophisticated, and would just know the image is on your page. And that may or may not be a concern...

But I have a folder for html pages, a folder for thumbnail images, and a folder for "full size" images, in web terms. I just FTP the files to whichever folder is appropriate.

I reckon if you have the means to upload your own pictures, then you should do that. It will definitely help with the SEO and like ForrestCroce said, you could get traffic from Google image

I agree... if it's possible for you to host your picks then just keep doing it

Originally Posted by HighVoltage123

I agree... if it's possible for you to host your picks then just keep doing it

I'm with them...

So images can help with traffic, hmmm?? Thanks - -didn't know that one. Do you have to do anything to get listed or do people just find you by doing their images search in Google? Tx!

For my blog I generally use Flickr to save on space and bandwidth, but then photos aren't a big part of my blog and it's not monetized, it's simply a personal blog for my friends and family to view , so I'm not looking to drive traffic to it. If you want to build traffic it may make sense as suggested to host them yourself.

I had never thought of google images as a source of traffic!! Thanks for the heads up.

Originally Posted by fitnfree

So images can help with traffic, hmmm?? Thanks - -didn't know that one. Do you have to do anything to get listed or do people just find you by doing their images search in Google? Tx!

Originally Posted by einsteinsboi

I had never thought of google images as a source of traffic!! Thanks for the heads up.

Mind you this only represents the first handful of days in the month. Still, it shows I'm doing something wrong, because normally Google Images sends more than double the traffic their text/web search sends.

I'm not trying to monetize my site, either ... but I wrote it for a wider audience than my personal circle, and I'm an ego-maniac, so I do want traffic, and the quality type of it.

Now ... just so it's clear ... I'm not sure whether hosting the images on Flickr would have negative SEO implications or not. Google sends the page it found the image on to the search results, and if the jpeg lives on Flickr but is displayed on your page, that means you could still come up in the search. The company I work for hosts our images on Akami's globally load-balanced servers, and does well in certain rankings. But the jpeg file is also linked to from pages on Flickr, which are likely to be discovered by Google before your site gets recrawled, and this might knock your page out of the running.

I don't know enough to have the answer, but I know enough to ask the question...