Allow external URLs for feature images

Ideas
1

Would it be possible to have an option to enter the url for an already existing image as an alternative to uploading it? I see that the Unsplash option does just this, so I guess the heavy-lifting setup is already in place.

2

You can do this with a markdown card already, eg.

![alt text](https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/0fa31acb-2258-45b4-938f-14d3b5e1868d/190124-Ladies-in-Black-BTS.jpg)

but, now you mention it, if would be nice if pasting a valid image URL into the editor would just ā€œunfurlā€ it - similar to oEmbed :thinking:

Is that a possibility @Kevin?

3 Likes
3

I mean the featured image

4 Likes
4

This would be nice. You got my vote.

1 Like
5

Other than the markdown option already suggested, you can use slash-menu shortcuts. This would create an image card using the pasted url:

/image {url} Enter

We could also expand the embed to fetch the URL and check if itā€™s an image - I remember discussing that in the past but we didnā€™t get as far as implementing it.

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6

Iā€™ll change the topic title then as the current wording suggests something completely different.

Note: Changed topic title from ā€œEmbed externally hosted imagesā€ to ā€œAllow external URLs for feature imagesā€

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7

Any update here?

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8

Feature images canā€™t use external URLs, but images in the editor can be embedded using the `/image command like so:
image-unfurl

4 Likes
9

Why Feature images canā€™t use external URL? I think this provides more advantage.

3 Likes
10

bump this as I was just looking for the same to make file management easier.

1 Like
11

Yup, thatā€™d be pretty useful. As it stands, Ghost behaves pretty inconsistently with images - the inline uploaded images are just exported as links to the original site, while if you want to externalise your asset library to fix that, there is no way because the cover and featured images canā€™t take URLs and are exported within the json.

12

Earlier versions of ghost allowed this, but not now.

13

Upping this one. Wondering how else would one host featured images via CDN/External storage. For now I have to upload my featured images to Ghost. The rest of the images are pulled from external CDN URLs on my siteā€¦

1 Like
14

Any feedback from the Ghost team?

I expected this to ā€œjust workā€ and was a bit surprised to see it not be the case.

Would be awesome of this could be fixed, and it does not seem like such a big task?

1 Like
15

Does Ghost cache such external images? What if the external source is no longer available?

16

@viharm, it doesnā€™t replace it by any kind of local images, never.

BTW same as images in the bookmarks. That is why threre are two reasons to never use bookmarks:

  • Image from external website can gone
  • Loading of external images directly affects your page loading speed
17

Actually, since September Ghost now fetches and stores images for bookmark cards, including the favicon.

cc @viharm

1 Like
18

My bad, I was wrong. All my recent articles currently have re-uploaded images in bookmarks. But the old articles stay w/o updates (which is ok), that is where I checked before posting it here