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.
You can do this with a markdown card already, eg.
but, now you mention it, if would be nice if pasting a valid image URL into the editor would just “unfurl” it - similar to oEmbed 
Is that a possibility @Kevin?
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I mean the featured image
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This would be nice. You got my vote.
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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 it’s an image - I remember discussing that in the past but we didn’t get as far as implementing it.
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I’ll change the topic title then as the current wording suggests something completely different.
Note: Changed topic title from “Embed externally hosted images” to “Allow external URLs for feature images”
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Any update here?
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Feature images can’t use external URLs, but images in the editor can be embedded using the `/image command like so:
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Why Feature images can’t use external URL? I think this provides more advantage.
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bump this as I was just looking for the same to make file management easier.
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Yup, that’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 can’t take URLs and are exported within the json.
Earlier versions of ghost allowed this, but not now.
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 site…
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