Just came across this site this morning, www.imgred.com. They have a very interesting take on hot linking images from other sites. Yes, we all know that hot linking images is BAD with a capital B, A, and D but to download the image and upload it to the host (myspace or individual blog) can be tedious.

The way ImgRed solves this is to download the image once and serve it up from their site. The ease of use is also perfect in my book. To use ImgRed, just append the image url with http://imgred.com/ so the resulting image source would look like this:

<img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg" />

(this example was taken straight from their site)

It's that easy! No saving. No uploading. Fast and very intuitive.

On top of taking and serving the original, they also create a thumbnail of the image and serve that up as well. To view that just change the appended source from http://imgred.com/ to http://imgred.com/tn/

This is one of those "why didn't I think of that" solutions.