What is a Hotlinking?
Hotlinking is the practice of embedding images (or other resources) directly from somebody else's website in your website. Generally speaking, hotlinking is frowned upon or forbidden, and it's also a bad idea since it's subject to link rot.
Hotlinking isn't reposting. It's actually the opposite! Because when you repost, you're hosting the image on a different web server than the original.
How Hotlinking Works?
When your web browser accesses a webpage, it downloads a file containing HTML that can declare the webpage contains an image. The declaration of the image is going to look like this:
<img src="https://example.com/flower.jpeg" alt="A flower">As you can see above, the src attribute simply has a URL of the image to display, so the web browser fetches (downloads) the image located at the declared URL and displays it.
There is no restriction to what this URL may be. Web browsers can't stop webmasters from declaring a URL that's not located on their website but somebody else's. When they do that, your web browser will simply download the image from somebody else's website!
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