Publishers- Author Photos Heads Up

Dear Publishers who reprint articles from our site: If you want to ensure that your website doesn’t contain broken image links, then be sure to NEVER link to an authors image from our site. We never intended to host author photos for your benefit and the moment we shuffle our directory structure around, your site will have lots of broken image links.

Our reprint TOS doesn’t include the right to reprint the authors photo (See Section 1. o.).

If an author gives you permission to reprint their photo, then you are welcome to host it locally on your server, but don’t include our author images on your website… otherwise you’ll have a bunch of broken image links to fix someday soon.

Authors: It’s not that we don’t want to provide an additional free service that benefits you, but rather we don’t want tens of thousands of websites dependant on us to host their image files. It’s irresponsible for webmasters to expect us to host their author photo images, especially since it’s not even a smart move (3rd party image calls extends load times for their visitors) and that it’s always better for a webmaster to host the images local to their webserver.

Posted by on June 1, 2006 at 6:56 am | 2,120 views

6 Comments »


1
Jennifer Thieme writes:

Makes sense to me.

Comment provided June 1, 2006 at 8:25 AM

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2
Dina at Wordfeeder writes:

Hi Chris,

That’s an excellent point you make. The thought of all those unbroken links has me going into an OCD fit right now. (Just kidding.)

Here’s one thing that I noticed when I picked up my own article DIRECTLY FROM your site and posted it in my blog:

I used your Publish feature to grab the HTML text. After I published, I looked at my blog and was surprised to see my own photo there. The publisher form grabbed the image right from the author resource box!

That’s happening quite frequently on other sites who use your publish feature, actually.

Dina

Comment provided June 1, 2006 at 8:57 AM

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3
Christopher M. Knight writes:

Dina,

Can’t be. I just double checked this MYSELF an hour ago…

Can you prove it? :?) Tell us the steps you did that included the image in the HTML copy?‚  When I click on the EZINEPUBLISHER feature for my articles and one of your most recent – I don’t see the author image calls at all included.

Comment provided June 1, 2006 at 9:17 AM

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4
Dina at Wordfeeder.com writes:

DOH!

I’m wrong. :) I know what happened because I just recreated the situation.

I must have picked up the article directly from the actual article page and NOT from the publisher tool. I just highlighted all the text and plopped it in my blog, is what I did.

The photo was grabbed along with the author bio, and that was why it mysteriously appeared in my blog.

So, the lesson learned here is that if publishers use the PUBLISH tool as opposed to just copying and pasting from the main page, they won’t inadvertantly lift the author photo, which is against the rules anyway.

Glad we could resolve this.

:)

Dina

Comment provided June 1, 2006 at 9:49 AM

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5
Christopher M. Knight writes:

I had that feeling… Glad to hear.

Comment provided June 1, 2006 at 10:13 AM

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6
Lance Winslow writes:

Interesting point, last night I was doing some Hurricane Research to write some articles for this New Hurricane Season, which starts today, I saw one of my articles and clicked on it, another website had picked it up and it was on there site. And that little picture was there, but in the opposite corner? It must have been picked up before the pictures were moved to the right lower corner. Interesting indeed.

Comment provided June 1, 2006 at 2:23 PM

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