"The Balance of Power" Image Hosting vs. Your Site ?

Here's something you might want to chime in about.

I was just getting ready to add another page to my website tonight, for some wide angle photos. One more time, I tried a free account with Smugmug to see how their code would work loaded in my own page.

Then a thought came to mind about what percentage of images to host on a sharing site. 100% or 0% or 50%.

Something I learned the past few years, is that there is value for website traffic due to images stored in a website. If we store all our images at, say, Smugmug, and someone does a Google image search, its near 100% that their query will lead them to Smugmug. Possibly leading them to our album or profile, but possibly providing a path to other Smugmug users.

If we make our own internal albums on our own website, many image queries should lead back to our own specific site.

So have any of you given any significant thought to this nature of image storage in relation to the ebb and flow of web searches and traffic?

Would you think that the site holding the storage of images holds the balance of power regarding internet popularity and traffic?

This may boil down to several preferences including presentation, sales, internet traffic and convenience.

Pretty much true and web hosting space is cheap so load em up!

If you have a website, images should be on your website. It seems like a no-brainer to me.

You can store the photos on smugmug and link them from your website, the viewer would never know that they left your website. Then you have the option of using smugmugs printing services and don't have to pay for that on your website.

I had a couple of quotes done for websites that would do this. They told me that a website would be easier to find in a search than smugmug...I'm not internet expert, so I'm taking their word for it, but it makes sense to me.

I do a combination of both. My website is powered by Wordpress on my own server. My photos are on Smugmug.

ShotByTom wrote in post #11413310
You can store the photos on smugmug and link them from your website, the viewer would never know that they left your website. Then you have the option of using smugmugs printing services and don't have to pay for that on your website.

I had a couple of quotes done for websites that would do this. They told me that a website would be easier to find in a search than smugmug...I'm not internet expert, so I'm taking their word for it, but it makes sense to me.

A means to test opinions would probably be to just test searches on Google images and see what images show up, and whether they are to websites or image hosts. One I just tried, was this ...

http://www.google.com/​images=redwood+trunk

Mousing-over the thumbnails, I see a mix of websites and image host sites, plus stock photo sites. In the third row down, I spotted one of my own showing a diagonal chainsaw slash across the trunk. And another of mine in the 5th row down showing fire scars.

In the first 25 images, I noticed about 5 from Flickr.com. Which means that Flickr seems to capture 20% of the screen on this particular search query.