I’ve always allowed reposting of anything I put here on the open, since from now on I’m going to be posting 99% of everything free I thought I should restate my position.

I prefer if you hotlink! Dreamhost gives me a ton of bandwith of which I use less than 10%
If you hotlink I can see where it’s linked and maybe check out what people are saying about it.

Uploading to an image host is not doing me a favour, those guys run their own ads and profit off my work that way, plus they will delete eventually, leaving you with broken links. I tend not to delete anything (Again, dreamhost, tons of disk space) and sometimes I’ll upload updated versions of the same file replacing flawed ones.

If it’s an imageboard where you have to upload, then that’s fine too, it’s the way they work. In any case, a clickable link back, if allowed, is very, very welcome! Sure people can read the url on the image, then type it in their browser bar and come visit, but few do, a click is a lot easier. And a link is followed by search engine robots and they use how many links a website has to determine how important it is.

Finally, about the url stamp, I’m afraid they are absolutely necessary – I know people don’t like them, and I noticed people reposted the versions without the stamps while ignoring ones that did have the url on them, but I’m not running some site that automatically stamps every image they come accross, I spend hours making this stuff and without the url on it it just becomes free content for a thousand generic gallery sites. So if you like an image enough to repost it without the urls, please consider doing so with them too.