Have you ever wondered how some of the chaps on here can get an image into a post so fast?

Well, the image displayed is simply an embedded link to an image found on the web.

As I have covered embedding images hosted by a user in the post above, this much shorter post will give guidance to those wishing to display images they find on the web without having to go through the process of hosting. This is a very quick process indeed, and requires only a couple of quick steps:

Web Image Hosting

Ok, so you're chatting on the forum, the pace is quick, and someone mentions something that just begs for an image based gag. How do you drop the image in?

Let's say you need an image of a bonfire for example. It's easy to grab, simply by opening a Google search page, clicking on 'Images' and typing 'bonfire' into the text box.





So there you have a page full of pictures of bonfires. Now let's suppose you want to use the image at the top left (usually an ideal image), click on the image to open the web page. Normally you'll see the image in its original context as below:





Now, in order to get the address for the image, you need to click the 'see full size image' link to the right of the thumbnail. This will show the image at full size and the address shown in the address bar is the link you require to embed the image:





Now all you have to do is copy the link in the address bar to your post and put the image tags at each end - [img] at the start and [/img] at the end. The result is as below:





Once you get used to linking images this way (known as hot-linking in the industry), you'll be able to get images from the web into your posts in a matter of seconds. It's worth bearing in mind though that some web hosts block hot-linking so don't be surprised if you get a screen telling you that when you click the 'see full size image' link. Most will hot-link though.

Good luck!