IDEA: Image that contains built-in links

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Posted in » Business Ideas - by Ades on April 25th, 2008

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gifcool.gifDigital Images (for the web) have come a long way, there are many different formats in use at the moment (eg: gif, jpg, png and tiff). But there hasn’t really been any significant advancement since the founding of GIF format (see right) in 1987 which supports animation unlike other formats. Most of the later advancements mainly focused on image quality and compression, rather than coming up with something new.

New Idea

I have a new idea. How about images that are able to contain hyperlinks in them? Don’t you think that would be cool? Just like GIF format that allows animation within the same image, this new format would be able to contain the link within the image itself. Advantages would be many:

  • Good bye <a href=” for banners - with this new image format, you would create banners with built-in links in them. So, when you want to advertise, sending your banner only would be sufficient. You would just say “here is my banner, put it up on your site, the link is already inside”.
  • Photographer’s could protect their images - photographers could insert their website’s URL in their photos. So, if their photo is distributed or copied by other websites, users would always find their way to the original photographer who took the photo by clicking on the image.
  • Hotlinking would be partially solved - hotlinking is when people link to the images on your server from their sites. This means everytime someone views their page and the image is shown, you lose bandwidth, because the image resides on your server.

    By implementing a link on your images, this problem of hotlinking would be partially solved. Because currently when someone links to your images, the normal user won’t know on which server the image resides, unless he/she looks at the code.

    But when you insert a link in the image, user’s mouse pointer would change to “hand” (ready to click) when he/she “mouse overs” over the image. Of course, many of these thieves (hotlinkers) wouldn’t want their readers to click away and go to your website. Therefore, this would discourage them from linking to your images directly. Result: hotlinking problem solved!

These are the main advantages that I could think of. Probably there would be many other advantages (and uses for this). So, anyone want to work on this project? If you do, don’t forget to credit me for the idea huh?! ;)

Anyway, what is your thoughts on this? Do you think it would be good? Do you think there would be any negative sides for this?

P.S For the image format, we could use .ade extension ;)

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13 Responses to “IDEA: Image that contains built-in links”

  1. By SEOrious Results on Apr 25, 2008

    Definitely a cool idea from an SEO perspective. Pictures don’t get counted by the search engine spiders, this idea will circumvent that particular issue, correct?

  2. By David Bradley on Apr 25, 2008

    Isn’t there some scripting vulnerability in the jpeg format? Perhaps that could be adapted for a legitimate application, such as embedding a link?

    db

  3. By Futon-Matt on Apr 25, 2008

    I think the idea does have some merit, but writing a link doesn’t take a whole lot of effort.

  4. By Dining Tables on Apr 25, 2008

    Great idea indeed. I hope that someone works on it and comes out with a workable model.

  5. By Recliner on Apr 26, 2008

    Blame this on my ignorance, but i actually thought this could already be done! But if this is a new idea, Kudos to you!

  6. By Television on Apr 26, 2008

    Good idea!

  7. By Marketing Man on Apr 26, 2008

    Hi Ades

    I think you are onto something, especially for photographers to protect their images. If I hear of anything I will let you know.

  8. By Fitness Site on Apr 27, 2008

    How can an image contain link ?
    I didnt got it.

  9. By Elections photos on Apr 27, 2008

    In HTML you can map links to image coordinates, so its kinda old news.

  10. By Ades on Apr 28, 2008

    Fitness Site, that’s the thing. I am proposing for the image to contain link.

    Elections photos, image-maps is totally not it. Image maps are basic HTML things but I am talking about something that could be embedded inside digital images.

  11. By Budzer on Apr 29, 2008

    Good idea but we will have to face this problem.
    1. Someone hack our image and claim ownership.
    2. Image infected by a virus.

  12. By shawal on May 1, 2008

    Ades, i just want to ask you one question, please guide me…

    What plugins do you use for your Related Post?

    Can you recommend me one…

    Thanks in advance…

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