When I try to link directly to a picture on a Geocities website it always shows as a broken link or that it cannot find the requested item, but the webpage and the photo come up fine if the webpage itself is accessed. Why and is there a way to directly link to Geocities photos?
Because they don’t want you to! There is a file on your Geocities website (which you probably don’t have access to) called httpaccess (or something simliar). This file contains instructions which forbid “image linking”. Note that Geocities might do this at a domain level via some other type of tool - this is the only way I know how to do it.
The reason they do it is simple - they make money off showing ads on your webpages. They don’t want you signing up and using up their bandwidth for things (like image linking) that use up bandwidth yet don’t display the ads that pay their bills.
Direct image linking is blocked because Yahoo! see it as stealing bandwidth. If someone can access pictures on a GeoCities website without actually visiting the webpage then they are avoiding the advertisements that make GeoCities money.
Angelfire and Tripod do the same thing (believe me, nothing is more annoying than opening a webpage that uses a tiled background that has been linked from an Angelfire webpage…)
critter42