Dear clean86,
When you visit a web site, your web browser downloads a web page, and then downloads the images linked into that web page. Your web browser tells that web site who the "referrer" was for each request, including the image downloads. This is called the referring URL.
Some web sites will refuse to serve up web images when the referring URL was not a page on their own website. They consider other sites that link external pages into their images to be guilty of "bandwidth theft". One reason this is decreasingly the general case, is because a negative side effect of this practice is that it lowers a site's Google rankings to engage in this practice. Google ranks web sites generally based upon how linked in they are.
For sites that do configure their servers to prevent deep image linking, when you visit that site you see the images in the article along with that article. You copy and paste and excerpt of the article, including that image to SI. You are able to preview the image in your post, because the image is still in your web browser cache from when you visited the site originally. Your web browser figures, "why should I download this image again when I already have it?".
But when you post the article others cannot see the image, because the server hosting the image refuses to serve it up to the web browser of those other SI users - the referring URL to the image is SI and not the original site.
You may actually still be able to see the image on SI yourself during the period that the image remains in your web browser cache from when you read the article on the original site. But once that cached image expires and is removed from your cache, you also will no longer be able to see it in your post. This can be deceptive, because you initially believed you had posted the image and even saw it within your own SI post. You were tricked by your own cache.
The only real workarounds are: to become familiar with which websites engage in this practice and to not post article excerpts from those websites; to replace those images when composing your post with equivalent images from other sites (easily found via Google) that don't disable external image embedding, or to upload the images to SI - which might be bad because you could be violating rights of the image copyright holder in doing as such.
Regards,
@Dima |
